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Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The 6ft 10in Nigerian giant who played Ridley Scott's first Alien
The original Alien Xenomorph was discovered not in a glowing egg on a faraway planet or scuttling around a gloopy nest, but down the pub. That's where Peter Archer, one of the film's casting directors, first clapped eyes on Bolaji Badejo, a 6ft 10in Nigerian graphic design student. The film's director, Ridley Scott, needed an extremely tall, slender, long-limbed person to fit inside the alien suit, as designed by Swiss artist HR Giger. Badejo was perfect for the gig. 'How would you like to be in movies?' Archer asked him. Badejo was later described as reserved, mild-mannered and polite. One special effects crew member dubbed him as, quite simply, 'the quiet man'. But he brought the terrifying Xenomorph to life – a primal, skin-crawling, strangely elegant monster that spawned a franchise, which now continues with the TV series Alien: Earth. The Sigourney Weaver -starring original put Badejo through the space wringer. Barely able to see and sweating buckets in that Alien head, he was forced to squeeze into a spaceship crevice for hours and hours, almost passed out as he was hung upside down, and started to suffocate as he dangled in the air and unfurled from a cocoon-like state. Elsewhere, he battled a stressed, stingy producer who fired obscenities at him. But Badejo, who was not an actor, took it all on the alien chin and only complained out loud when he was back in the pub with Giger. It would be his only film role; Badejo tragically died at just 39 years old from sickle cell anaemia, which he'd been diagnosed with as a child. Born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1953, Bolaji Badejo grew up as one of six children in an affluent, influential family. His father, Victor, was director general of the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. Living through a three-year civil war in Nigeria, the family moved to Ethiopia in 1972, where Badejo studied fine art, and later to San Francisco. The family then relocated to England, where Victor became a vicar. Badejo decided to study graphic design in London, which is when Archer first saw him – propping up the bar of a Soho student pub. Finding an actor, performer, or, indeed, anyone of the right proportions had proved, well, a tall order. Scott's team had looked at basketball players, models and even a trio of circus contortionists (who the director had considered packing into the suit like Muppets disguised in a trenchcoat). They also considered the 7ft 3in actor Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in Star Wars. But none had been the right fit for their Xenomorph. 'We started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man,' recalled Scott in 2008. 'So, my casting director said, 'I've seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about 7ft tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.' So, he brought Bolaji Badejo to the office.' 'As soon as I walked in, Ridley Scott knew he'd found the right person,' Badejo said in a 1979 interview. Special effects supervisor Nick Allder later told CNN about the first time he saw Badejo, who was just 24 when production began at Shepperton and Pinewood studios. 'Ridley walked in with this guy. I thought I was looking at a giraffe,' Allder said. 'Stood in the doorway, you could see his body, but his head was above the frame.' Allder added: 'He did keep inside himself, quite a bit. Being on a film set must have been quite strange for him. To have been the centre of attraction… it was a bit of a shock to him.' They created a body cast of Badejo, for which he had to pose naked and totally still. The finished Alien costume, made by Giger, was constructed from latex, consisting of various sections that fit together over a black onesie. The suits – worn by Bolaji and a stuntman (who took over for more dangerous action scenes) – cost more than $250,000 (£184,000). Scott had quite specific ideas about what he wanted from Bolaji in alien mode. 'I don't want to see him running around,' he told his crew during production. 'Every time we see him, I want him in a new pose. I want him basically balancing on one finger on occasion, you know? Every movement is going to be very slow, very graceful, and the alien will alter shape so you never really know exactly what he looks like.' To prepare for the physicality of the role, Badejo studied tai chi and mime and practised stalking the corridors of the Nostromo spaceship wearing a mock-up alien head. 'I had to keep my head up straight. That was the secret of wearing the suit,' Badejo explained about his performance. 'It was terribly hot, especially the head. I could only have it on for about 15 or 20 minutes at a time. When I took it off, my head would be soaked.' The alien is sparsely seen in the finished film – that's part of its brilliance – and relatively few of Bolaji's scenes made the final cut. One scene, however, sees the Xenomorph stalk and kill crew members Parker and Lambert, played by Yaphet Kotto and Veronica Cartwright respectively. 'The idea was that the creature was supposed to be graceful as well as vicious, requiring slow, deliberate movements,' Bolaji told the sci-fi magazine Cinefantastique. 'But there was some action I had to do pretty quick. I remember having to kick Yaphet Kotto, throw him against the wall and rush up to him. Veronica Cartwright was really terrified. After I fling Kotto back with my tail, I turn to go after her, there's blood in my mouth, and she was incredible. It wasn't acting; she was scared.' Weaver recalled that Ridley Scott kept Badejo away from the Nostromo crew to create a sense of separation and man vs monster. 'Bolaji was about 7ft tall and looked like he came from a different universe anyway, and they made up this alien suit for him,' Weaver said in 2010. 'Ridley was very careful not to have him standing around, drinking tea with us during breaks, and because he was kept apart from us and we never chatted, when it came to seeing him as this creature during a scene, it was electrifying. It didn't feel that we were acting scared at all.' Elsewhere, though, Kotto stood up for Badejo, who kept missing his marks because of the conditions in the suit and his restricted eyesight. A producer, stressed by the cost of wasted time, furiously swore at Bolaji. According to a story told by Dan O'Bannon, the Alien screenwriter, Kotto 'physically intervened' and warned the producer, 'Leave the brother alone!' Badejo worked on the film for around four months, and was repeatedly called back in for reshoots as they figured out problems around shooting the monster. It proved tricky to get the cumbersome beast to do exactly what Scott envisioned, and they were long, tough, sweaty, sometimes painful days for Badejo, who suffered for his art inside the alien. 'That poor thing was in that suit all day long,' said Cartwright. For starters, no one had thought about the fact he couldn't sit down with all his biomechanical extremities and huge, lashing tail. It took actor Tom Skerritt (playing Nostromo captain Dallas) to point out their monster's obvious discomfort. The crew built a swing seat so Bolaji could take off an alien load. Talking in a retrospective documentary, Skerritt also remembered Badejo walking around the set, talking politics with the wardrobe lady and wearing bright blue Adidas trainers with his Xenomorph costume. One of Badejo's most uncomfortable moments came as he was suspended in the air. 'Ridley had a lot more ideas than what you see on the screen, but some things were impossible,' Badejo explained. 'There was one part where I was hanging from a wire about 10ft or 15ft above the ground, and I curled up. I was like a cocoon of my own, and I come out very slowly and stretch all out. But I couldn't do it. I was held up by a harness around my stomach, and I was suffocating trying to make those movements.' For another scene that didn't make the cut, the crew strapped him to a big arm contraption that raised upwards, sending him 20ft in the air. But when it came back down, he was flipped upside down and got dizzy as the blood rushed to his head. He refused to do it again. When the stuntman performed the exact same manoeuvre, the stuntman fainted. It wasn't the only time Badejo said no. He also declined to share the alien head with handfuls of maggots, which were supposed to squirm in the translucent part of the head to give the impression of a squelching brain. The head was, however, smeared with lubricant jelly, which was used for the alien's slobber. 'They must have had about 2,000 tubes of KY Jelly, just to get the effect of that slime coming out of his mouth,' Badejo said. For the final scenes, in which the alien follows Weaver's Ripley on to an escape shuttle and emerges from a narrow crevice in the wall, he had to clamber in and out of the cramped space and squeeze himself in there for a day and a half. As Badejo put it: 'There was a lot of smoke, it was hard to breathe, and it was terribly hot.' Badejo did express interest in playing the alien again in a potential sequel, but continued training in graphic design and commercial art. He returned to Nigeria in 1980 and ran an art gallery. Dancer Carl Toop took over the main Xenomorph duties for James Cameron 's 1986 sequel, Aliens. In 1983, Badejo lost a brother to sickle cell anaemia and struggled with the disease himself in the following years. His wife, Yinka, would say that Badejo 'never let having sickle cell anaemia affect his life. He coped with it as best he could'. He died in Lagos on December 22 1992, leaving behind Yinka and their two children. Though he went unrecognised for his only film role, Badejo helped create one of cinema's most enduring monsters. As Badejo said at the time, 'The fact that I played the part of the Alien, for me, that's good enough.'
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Alien's tragic star: The cruel fate of 7ft-tall Nigerian student who played monster in 1979 film after chance sighting - as new show airs
With its spine-chilling special effects and utterly horrifying scenes, Alien was the film that bid a slimy goodbye to the 1970s. The production, which told the story of a Space mission gone horribly wrong, made director Ridley Scott and actress Sigourney Weaver household names. But the central star was someone whose face viewers never saw - and who was not an actor at all. Nigerian art student Bolaji Badejo was the man chosen to play the eponymous monster after Scott's casting director spotted him in a pub. Thanks to his 6ft 7inch, lanky frame, Badejo was the perfect fit for the $250,000 latex suit made by surrealist artist HR Giger. And despite having no experience on the big or small screen, Badejo pulled off a role that would go down in cinema folklore. Tragically though, by the time second sequel Alien 3 was released in 1992, Badejo was seriously ill with sickle cell anaemia, a disease he had suffered from all his life. He would not live to see the further spin-off films, or the full impact of a franchise that is now being refreshed with the release of TV drama Alien: Earth. The original film tells the story of the crew of space ship the Nostromo, who encounter a murderous life form on a planet far from Earth. Weaver's performance as the the gun-toting Ripley disproved the notion that a woman would not be suitable for such a role. But Badejo, who was plucked from total obscurity, proved that he was up to the task too. In a 2008 interview, Scott recounted how he settled on the Nigerian to play the Alien after he was spotted by chance in London. 'We started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man,' he said. 'So my casting director [Peter Archer] said, "I've seen a guy in a pub in Soho who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body." 'So he brought Bolaji Badejo to the office.' In the autumn of 1979, with his role in Alien still fresh in his mind, Badejo gave an interview to American film magazine Cinefantastique. He said of the suit, the head of which was brought to life by a mechanics system created by the late special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi: 'It was all manual, remote-controlled. 'There's still a space in it for my head. I had it on just to make sure nothing goes wrong with the posture of the head or how tall it is in comparison to the other sequences.' The slime that came out of the Alien's mouth was in fact K-Y Jelly, the popular lubricant more commonly associated with bedroom antics than film production. 'They must have had about 2,000 tubes of K-Y Jelly, just to get the effect of that slime coming out of his mouth,' Badejo added. 'A lot of it was spread around the face. I could barely see what was going on around me, except when I was in a stationary position while they were filming. 'Then there were a few holes I could look through.' To prepare for his all-important role, Balejo took Tai Chi and mime classes so that he could glide in an alien-like fashion. His widow, Yinka, previously recalled: 'Even though some days were long and gruelling and he had to make an early morning start, Bolaji never complained.' Veronica Cartwright, who portrayed crew member Lambert, vividly remembered the moment Balejo's Alien attacked her. She said in 2013: 'Believe me, when he comes after me in that scene I didn't have to do anything. 'I just looked at him and, the thing was, once he uncoiled he just stood there. And I just had to look at him, and you go, "oh s***". 'And instinctively what he did was just amazing. He had this incredible presence. And you know people say, "how did you make yourself scared?" 'I didn't do anything; I just had to look at him.' Speaking to the Mail in 2010, Weaver said Balejo was separated from the rest of the cast so they would not become desensitised to his appearance. 'Ridley was very careful not to have him standing around, drinking tea with us during breaks and because he was kept apart from us and we never chatted, when it came to seeing him as this creature during a scene, it was electrifying. 'It didn't feel that we were acting scared at all.' The star also heaped praise on the film, which she said 'put me on the map'. 'I think Alien really was ahead of its time,' she said. 'It showed that women and men could do the same jobs and that in many ways, women's patience and fortitude and organisation sometimes made them better suited for dangerous work than men. 'Ripley was a kind of warrior and I''m really glad she got to wear proper clothes instead of a tiny skirt or something. 'I didn't feel I had to be glamorous, whereas now with female action heroes I think there's more of an expectation of that.' 'It was my first big, real job and I remember during the first week, Ridley kept saying to me: "Try not to look in the camera" and I'd say: "I'm trying not to look in the camera, but you're always putting it right in front of me". 'I didn't know anything! So I cut my teeth on Alien and every time I did a sequel, I came back with that much more confidence and knowledge and technique.' Balejo went on to have two children, Bibi and Yinka, with his wife and set up his own art gallery. But his condition began to affect him more severely in the late 1980s. In 1992, a few months after his 39th birthday, the star fell ill. He was taken to St Stephen Hospital in Lagos and died there in December 1992. Alien: Earth has been made by director Noah Hawley, the man behind successful TV drama Fargo. Airing on Disney+, it is set two years before the events of the first film. The show depicts the aftermath of a deep space vessel crash-landing on Earth with an alien on board. Alien:Earth stars Sydney Chandler as lead character Wendy, whilst Timothy Olyphant and Alex Lawther also feature. Mr Hawley told Reuters: 'By bringing the story to Earth, we're shifting to, "can humanity itself survive, right?" 'And then it becomes a question of, "well, what is humanity, and do we really deserve to survive?"'
