Sigourney Weaver Believes Her 'Working Girl' Character Would Now Work in Crypto

Sigourney Weaver, the Alien, Avatar and Ghostbusters star, 73, leaves sci-fi behind for a dramatic turn as June Hart, the grandmother to the title character in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (August 4 on Prime Video). Based on Holly Ringland’s bestselling debut novel, the seven-part family drama is the story of Alice Hart, a young girl who moves in with her grandmother at Thornfield Flower Farm when her parents die in a mysterious fire. But Thornfield is more than a farm; it’s a refuge for abused women. Alice learns to keep secrets on the farm but finds out that keeping mum about her family’s past may have dire consequences.

Parade sat down with Weaver to discuss the new show and her storied career.

Walter Scott: Were you familiar with the book The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart prior to getting the script? 

Sigourney Weaver: I wasn’t. I read the first three episodes, and then I got my hands on the book, which is incredible. Holly’s an incredible writer and an incredible woman, and the book just jumps off the page. [She creates ] these characters, these situations that are at once painful but also just remarkable. The resurrection of these women, all the different characters, through the whole story is very hopeful and exciting.

But my character died on page 100 [in the book], so I was a little surprised that I kept going through episode seven [in the TV series]. I think [showrunner] Sarah [Lambert] did a great job of putting that together with [director] Glendyn [Ivin]. We mapped it out so that you see June’s particular way of handling things in her life. I’m glad she has time to realize that she’s made some mistakes and has time in a way for her own epiphany, her own rebirth as it were.

This story is about love, loss and redemption, but it’s also about these damaged and abused women. What was it about the subject matter that spoke to you most? 

I think the spirit of Holly’s book, and the spirit of the writing of these shows is, yes, these women have a history of damage, and yet when you are watching the show, for the most part, these women are so there for each other and there is so much humor and resiliency and Australian friendship. I loved my time with the Flowers, the women who come to my farm to escape a violent household. They were such incredible actors and people, so to me there was always more light in it than dark.

There are very dark sequences, but there’s always more light. There’s more hope, there’s a lot of love, and an increasing amount of understanding and forgiveness. Considering that America has such serious problems with women and domestic violence, it was very meaningful to me to participate in a project where we got to tell these stories in a thorough and frank but positive way. You see us come out of these things.

June keeps her emotions below the surface. Does that kind of character make it more challenging as an actress to convey what you want the audience to know about her? 

I don’t think that June could afford one moment of looking too hard. She doesn’t want to look back, and it’s almost like an animal instinct. Her animal instinct says, “These things aren’t to be talked about. The more we invoke them, the more powerful they are in our lives.” And so, it’s really many sins of omission that she neglects to tell Alice.

But I wasn’t making these decisions. Everything, what I felt for June, was because of what happened to her, who she was, and the situation she was in. It was like Pandora’s box. She could not open that box; she didn’t know what would happen. And even if it was right or wrong, keeping the box closed, she at least would be able to deal with what happened.

There are so many secrets in this story. Will we learn why June is so determined to help other women? Is it as simple as she knows her son is a violent man, or is there more to it? 

There’s more to it. I think there’s definitely more to it, and I think it’s something that happens and then grows until it becomes this lifelong commitment. I think it’s a wonderful story about these women having a safe place to live, and June stakes her life on it. She is their protector and will absolutely lay down her life for any of them. And I think the reason she’s willing to do that is because she knows the cost of that violence. And, again, it’s all reflex for her. It isn’t like, Well, I think I’ll do this. No, it’s just pure animal energy.

Your characters loves being with the Flowers, meaning the women, but she also is with the actual flowers. Did you learn anything about flowers in Australia from working on this project? 

My husband [Jim Simpson] and I arrived in Australia and went into [COVID] quarantine for two weeks. We were in this empty hotel suite guarded by Australian police who were very funny and a little embarrassed by the fact that we couldn’t even go out the door to empty the garbage. Anyway, the art department sent over, about every three days, a huge, big bouquet of Australian flowers and plants unlike anything I’d ever seen before in America.

Related: Get to Know Sigourney Weaver’s Husband Jim Simpson and Their Love Story

A lot of them are seed pods. They’re thorny, they’re bristly, they are so utterly different—as different from our flora and fauna as the animals are. And it was the only thing of interest in our entire place where we lived for two weeks, so I fell in love with them there. It’s like being around plants from another planet. When I see our plants and the emphasis that Americans put on beauty and balance and everything, they’re missing that whole spectrum of these tough, tough plants that can live in the bush. I do miss those terribly.

As a gardener, it gets under your skin, these amazing plants and how they’ve survived. These flannel flowers, wattle and all these others. One of the things I love about this series is you really visit Australia, you see its cane fields and its farms and its towns, and you really get to know the flowers. And you will even get to understand the use of flowers as a way of saying things to each other that are just too hard to put into words. Holly came up with this language of flowers and I think by the end of the show we’re all very grateful that there was this language.

Speaking of your new appreciation for flowers, you’ve experienced other films that had a major impact on your life. I am thinking, for instance, that after Gorillas in the Mist, you started working with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. 

I did do that, and that had a huge impact. Just being with the gorillas every other day for two months before we started shooting was an incredible gift and changed the way I look at everything. And in Avatar, I learned how to act under water, to free dive. And in this, I really had to learn straight up and down, the accent, why the accent was like this, and about the flowers and the life outside of town.

It was a complete immersion into both Australia, but also the world of this story, which is very exotic in many ways, and so beautifully shot by Sam Chiplin. I swear, I’ve never seen anything like this on television. I had the pleasure of seeing it on a bigger screen, thank goodness, because it’s so worth it. I wish everyone could see it on the biggest screen they could find because it’s so cinematic.

It’s almost 45 years since you starred as Ripley in the first Alien. The role is considered the birth of the action female hero. What are your feelings all these years later when you see so many women kicking butt on a screen? 

Well, I think we’ve always had heroines like that. Even the movies of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s had Bette Davis. No one was going to help her unless she bewitched them or something. I feel I was very lucky to get to play Ripley just as a person; I didn’t have to worry about looking a certain way, I got to live that life as that character who was sort of an every-man character. She managed to survive because of her character. No one else was going to help her.

So, I hope it was helpful, but I think it took a long time for the business to change so that normal women, not in space, could also be portrayed for the strength they have, the resilience they have, and the independence they have. And June, of course, she is not a woman who wants a man anywhere near her for any reason; she does not have a good relationship with them. But June is a completely believable character. There are so many different kinds of women and most of the time women are not portrayed on screen to be as interesting as women really are, as capable, as diverse, and as incredible.

To me, women are the ones who are keeping the planet together. I just reflect what I see, but I’m really thrilled that I got to play a part like Ripley. I felt it was, as you say, it’s my Henry V, because there weren’t roles like that for women in theater or in film. So, I was extremely lucky to work with Walter Hill, David Giler and Ridley Scott, and be able to just tell the truth about Ripley.

Another fan favorite of yours is Working Girl, because it spoke about the struggle women had in business at the time. Is that a happy memory for you? 

It definitely shows your comedy chops, and you had such great co-stars in Harrison Ford and Melanie Griffith. It was a great experience, and in fact, I spent the weekend with Ann Roth who did the costumes, and she was saying, “Don’t you have a photograph of you wearing the costume from Working Girl?” And I said, “God, I must have one. I know they’re online, but I can’t actually hand you one that’s in color,” because she wanted to put it up on her studio wall. I worked with Ann many times, and Mike Nichols.

It was an amazing ensemble; it was an amazing script. I loved playing Katharine Parker. I went and studied with an amazing woman in mergers and acquisitions for a couple of months, understanding about her world, which was like 99 percent men and the occasional woman. So, for both these women, for Tess and Katharine, it was not easy. And it was just one of those terrible things that they were not working together. But I’m often asked, what would Katharine Parker be doing now? And I always say, “Oh, I know exactly what she’d be doing. She’d be in cryptocurrency. She’d have her own and it would be called BitchCoin.”

Related: It Pays to Be a ‘Working Girl!’ Sigourney Weaver’s Net Worth In 2023, From ‘Alien’ to ‘Avatar’ and Beyond

Is there still something that you hope to achieve in the world? 

I think in September at the United Nations, we are going to pass the High Seas Treaty, and we’ll hopefully get many, many nations to sign onto it because it’s very important that we get to that goal, which is the least we should do of 30x30, which is 30 percent of our world’s ocean is protected from industrial fishing and all the other abuses on the high seas [by 2030]. The high seas are like the wild west. You saw the terrible tragedy of what happened with the immigrants crossing the Mediterranean.

There has to be some working together to prevent these tragedies, both for humans but also for all of the amazing animals in the sea who are constantly being trapped in nets and different things. It’s been interesting watching the story about the Titan, because one of the things they bring up is that there’s so much debris now in the ocean that at any point it could have gotten snagged on something, and it didn’t have the capability of extracting itself. So, there’s so much to be done, I would say that that’s to me the most important thing.

Watch The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart only on Prime Video starting August 4, 2023.

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