Alien: Covenant Creature Designer Reveals Original Story Would’ve Had More Significant Role for Shaw

HN Entertainment recently interviewed Alien: Covenant creature designer Carlos Huante, who addressed the original script for the film, which was much different than the final product. According to Huante, earlier versions would’ve called for a much more significant role for Prometheus protagonist Shaw (Noomi Rapace). Instead, Rapace only appears in a very small cameo role in the final film. Her ultimate fate is left offscreen. However, it’s basically stated that Shaw murdered her and then basically dissected her to use for his experiments. Also, a short film for Alien: Covenant, “The Crossing,” was released to promote the film, showing Shaw and David’s trip to the Engineer home world. Below are some highlights of Huante addressing the original versions of the story.

Huante on the original version: “Prior to the black goo genocide, I know that in the script I had, the early script, there was the story between Shaw and David, and how and why David got reassembled. That story happens at the beginning of the film but they kind of bypassed all of that which makes it a little more horrific in a way. So in the first version of Covenant called Paradise, she was hiding in the catacombs from David under the city and the story was that on her trip to the home world she got lonely and she had David hanging outside the ship, she didn’t want anything to do with him. But she still had to talk to him. Eventually, she ends up bringing his body in and reattaching him as they become friends during this trip. He ends up having affection for her in a friendship way.”

Huante on how Shaw initially lived: In the first version of what was called Paradise/Prometheus 2, Shaw was alive. They find her and she’s been hiding from David the whole time and she helps them escape. I told Ridley my wife and mother-in-law, who are strong characters themselves, they loved the Shaw character and the actress (Noomi Rapace) more than any other characters in the film and they’re not science fiction people, but they liked the film because of Noomi. I think it was a studio call as to why she didn’t return. What a shame.”