I love playing an alien.

My husband is from Hawaii and his father who was also born in Hawaii was a teenager when Pearl Harbor happened, right before church and he ran up and got on the roof of his grandfather's house and watched the planes go over.

There's a lot of conning as part of our society, I think.

What makes these creatures so awful is the feeling that they can use us in ways too horrible to imagine-and yet, we DO imagine them, which makes it worse than seeing it.

What I love about the 'Alien' franchise is I would do all kinds of films - dramas, comedies, whatever - and every now and then I'd be in this science fiction blockbuster that would re-introduce the character and me to a lot of audiences around the world and allow me to go back and do the smaller films again, so it was really a good balance for me.

After I left Yale, we were all doing these mad plays off - off Broadway. And I got back to that feeling I had from college, of everyone making up in front of one cracked mirror, which is what I loved - the scrappy theater idea. I think off-off Broadway healed me, made me an actor again, and I was in so many different crazy shows.

I'm no Ripley. I had doubts that I could play her as strongly as she had to be played, but I must say that it was fun exploring that side of myself. Women don't get to do that very often.