Sigourney Weaver is a treasure, full stop. The iconic roles she’s played—from Ellen Ripley in Alien to Gwen DeMarco in Galaxy Quest and well beyond—have made her a science fiction legend. She’s practically invisible in her latest franchise role, as teen Kiri in the Avatar films, which reunite her with her Aliens director James Cameron. But Weaver herself is all over the place lately: appearing at New York Comic Con; being interviewed for anything and everything related to Alien and its various related projects; and, soon, making her way to a galaxy far, far away in The Mandalorian and Grogu.

In a new interview with Empire, Weaver spoke at length about the process of making Avatar: Fire and Ash, but also about the enduring appeal of Ripley as a character—which Weaver partly chalks up to her vulnerability and self-doubt.

“I don’t think she ever has that certainty,” she says, relating a conversation she had with Alien co-star Ian Holm. “It’s complete improvisation from beginning to end. She never feels like she’s doing the right thing, or that there is a right thing, or a great path to some logical ending. It’s all chaos. It’s overwhelming, and all you can do is put one foot in front of another.”

Weaver approached the movie like it was theater work, which is where she was comfortable: “I tried not to think about the responsibility and pretended I was doing a play. I had a lot of confidence in a certain kind of theatre, and so just thought, ‘Oh, this is such a strange movie. It’s the Off-Off Broadway of movies.’”

She also notes that Alien writers Walter Hill and Dan O’Bannon wrote Ripley “like a guy,” saying, “And I think that’s the secret to writing any character — you write the individual, and all these cultural requirements of what a woman should be sort of go.”

Intriguingly, this seems to be the case with her Mandalorian and Grogu character too. “I think Jon Favreau thought, ‘Okay, we want this very strong character. Let’s make it a woman,’” Weaver says. “I’m not sure it was supposed to be a woman. I think again, these days, they often think, ‘What do I need to do to make this seem more timely?’, and now, because women are doing everything, hooray for us. [But] I just fell in love with the script and said, ‘I don’t know anything about this world.’ Jon said, ‘Well, you can watch the series,’ and I said, ‘Oh, there’s a series?!’”

The cultural juggernaut of The Mandalorian only reaches so far, it turns out.