Hollywood has a way of sometimes turning a character death into bookkeeping — a quick slash of the red pen, a cold open, a shrug — but for Michael Biehn, “Alien 3” wasn’t just the movie that casually killed off his beloved character Hicks (and Newt) without a proper send-off, it was the one that tried to get away with it in a callous manner without his permission.
Biehn relayed the full extent of the story on the “Just Foolin’ About” podcast while talking to James Cameron about “Avatar” and their long, intertwined history dating back to “Aliens.” And while fans had long fixated on the offscreen decision to wipe out Hicks at the top of “Alien 3,” Biehn’s absolute fury came from a second, uglier detail: the production had apparently already staged a gruesome image of Hicks using a body double made up to look like him.
“She came back to America,” Biehn said, describing a conversation with producer Raffaella De Laurentiis after she’d been at Pinewood. “She said, ‘I saw you over in England.’”
Biehn said he didn’t even understand what she meant at first. “I’m like, ‘What? I saw you over in England.’”
Then she clarified what she’d seen. “Yeah, I saw Hicks, chest blown out, whatever,” Biehn recalled. “Like… yeah, Hicks with his fucking chest blown open. That’s what they were going to do with him, okay? And I found out about it.”
Crucially, Biehn framed it as a done deal, not a hypothetical. “They had already shot the sequence where Hicks’ chest is blown out,” he said.
The actor likened it to an early version of the kind of unauthorized “replacement” that later became a clearer legal and industry flashpoint, even name-checking the Crispin Glover precedent when he sued Universal and Bob Zemeckis for using a lookalike of him on “Back To The Future II” when they decided not to ask him back for the sequel. “So we called them up and said, ‘This can’t happen, you know,” Biehn said.
According to Biehn, the studio tried to smooth it over in the usual way. “They started throwing money at me,” he said. But he insisted he wouldn’t budge — not because he was chasing a payday, but because he refused to have Hicks dismissed with a cheap, gruesome gag on someone else’s body.
“I said no. I said no,” Biehn exclaimed. “Because Hicks is not going to go out like that.”
“At that point, I had control over my image. You put so much effort into that fucking character,” he said to Cameron. “And so much… who he was. And so did I. And the fact that you’re going to dismiss him like this? No, that’s not going to happen.”
Biehn said the conflict eventually escalated to a phone call with the film’s director, David Fincher, then early in his career. “So we ended up negotiating, and Fincher called me on the phone,” he said. “And I was like, ‘Go f*ck yourself, man.’”
Cameron laughed at the detail. “I was wondering why you never worked with David Fincher,” he said with a laugh. But Cameron also made a point of separating the anecdote from any broader Fincher pile-on. “I like David Fincher, by the way,” Cameron said. “He’s my kind of ornery.”
Biehn ended by underlining the grimly funny footnote: even the director, by reputation, hadn’t exactly looked back fondly on the experience. “I think [Fincher’s] been quoted as saying nobody hates that movie as much as me,” he said.
Earlier in the conversation, Cameron said killing off Newt and Hicks in “Alien 3” was the “stupidest f*cking thing,” but noted that the studio had pushed around Fincher on the difficult picture, so he “[gave] him a pass” on that dubious choice.
The “Just Foolin’ About” with Michael Biehn podcast featuring James Cameron as the guest is loaded with great stories and is a fascinating watch. Check out the whole conversation below.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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