The following story contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus.
MUCH OF ALIEN:Romulus plays out like a “Greatest Hits” of sorts for the Alien franchise. A group of ragtag space inhabitants find themselves aboard a spacecraft, in the presence of a synthetic android, when suddenly they find themselves under attack of facehuggers and, eventually, Xenomoprhys. It’s scary, effective, and familiar; actors Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson make for worthy successors to the Ripley-esque final girl lead and the Bishop-esque android at the center of these stories.
But Romulus doesn’t entirely play things by the book. Director and co-writer Fede Álvarez was previously behind the films Evil Dead (2013) and Don’t Breathe (2016), both of which take big swings in their final act; Alien: Romulus, fittingly, does the same thing with the inclusion of a horrifying new villain/creature/monster known only as “The Offspring.”
Some important context: in the film, the character Kay (Isabela Merced) is established early on to be pregnant. She’s also later taken hostage by a Xenomorph, and while she is saved and survives, she’s injured badly. The film connects to Prometheus by introducing an elixir known as “The Prometheus Strain,” which is supposed to cure all sicknesses and continue the franchise’s quest (via the money-hungry Weyland-Yutani corporation) to create the perfect organism. When Kay presumably doesn’t think she’s going to make it much longer, she injects herself with the strain, and, for a brief period of time, seems OK.
But that’s not how things go in an Alien movie. After Rain and Andy defeated the Xenomorphs they were faced with, they returned to the ship and helped Kay place herself in stasis… but then she began giving birth. And it wasn’t a normal baby, but rather a creature; a human/Xenomorph hybrid. This becomes the final villain in Romulus, as Rain and Andy need to figure out a way to defeat this horrifying, freaky looking creature.
“The way it’s described, you’re trying to picture it in your head, and you don’t know how the director is going to create this character,” visual effects supervisor Daniel Macarin told Variety.”“Is it going to look like a Xenomorph? Is it going to be something very unique? Is it going to be something we’ve never seen before?”
As it turned out, the human/Xenomoprhy hybrid (known as “The Offspring”) looks like a cross between a human, a Xenomorph, and one of the Engineers from Prometheus. It took a bit of movie magic—and a first-time performance from one of the tallest basketball players of all time—to make it come to life.
Robert Bobroczkyi plays “The Offspring” in Alien: Romulus
The Offspring—who brings an unsettling level of fear to the final moments of Alien: Romulus before being heroically ejected out of the ship to its death—is played by Romanian basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi, who at 7’7” is one of the tallest of all time. Bobroczkyi’s career has been covered by the likes of ESPN and the Washington Post in the past, and he came to the United States to play college ball at Rochester Christian University in Michigan. His last time playing was in the 2021-2022 season.
Alien: Romulus was filmed from March to July of 2023, so it wasn’t long after Bobroczkyi’s basketball career that he found a spot as a horrifying creature in a major motion picture.
“The way he moves is just unique,” the film’s animation supervisor animation supervisor Ludovic Chailloleau told Variety in the same interview. “Considering his big size and the concept of what [the creature] is, he’s giving a lot of new things to watch visually, so I found that to be outstanding.”
The Offspring wasn’t just Bobroczkyi’s performance, though. Álvarez preferred practical effects for the most part, according to Variety, and he wanted to lean on the creature design team to make sure this new character was as subtle and realistic—relatively realistic at least—as possible.
That meant adding detail to other parts of The Offspring, like the tail, like random flaps of skin, and like bursts of gross, icky blood coming through. It was important “just to give it that little extra bit of horror that the audience will cringe and react to,” Macarin explained—and we’d say by the end of the movie, it paid off.
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