Cailee Spaeny

With Alien: Romulus, Cailee Spaeny finds herself up against an iconic menagerie of monsters. As she tells us, though, she's always been drawn to the dark.

Cailee Spaeny came out of nowhere, and suddenly she is everywhere.

Maybe she broke your heart in HBO’s Mare Of Easttown as the teenage mother lured into the woods to die. She was in Alex Garland’s philosophical sci-fi series Devs as tech genius Lyndon, and starred in Garland’s intense gut-punch of a film, Civil War. Most likely you will know her as the lead in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which earned her a Golden Globe nomination: she was the actor brave enough to take on a role that would not only be heavily scrutinised, but would also require her to apply cat-eyeliner, in one take, without a mirror (trust us, this is an impossible task — awards should be given for this alone). Her characters are memorable because they exist at the extremes of human experience, enduring tough, complicated lives.

Spaeny left school in Missouri at 13 to pursue a career in acting. Her parents were unsure what to do with their “rogue child” but they saw that she was determined, and her first feature role was at the age of 18 in Pacific Rim: Uprising, followed by Bad Times At The El Royale, On The Basis Of Sex, and Vice. She is now graduating to more adult characters: soon we’ll see her step into Sigourney Weaver’s enormous space boots, playing the lead in Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, set in the time between Alien and Aliens.

The 25-year-old still has a determination that feels like a lit fuse: it’s unstoppable. You can see it as she contorts herself in front of the camera for the Empire photoshoot: chameleonic, powerful, occasionally bordering on the alien herself. She’s very involved in the shoot, suggesting things, changing things, hiking up her skirt to step over electrical cords to get a look at the monitor. Afterwards, we sat down with Spaeny to find out where she came from, and where this rocket is going.

Read more at Empire.