The main protagonist of “Alien: Romulus” is Rain Carradine, played by rising star Cailee Spaeny. You may recognize her from a number of different movies and TV shows from the last several years. Spaeny’s career got a jump-start in 2018 when she appeared in four major movies: “Pacific Rim: Uprising” (as Amara Namani), “Bad Times at the El Royale” (as Rose Summerspring), “On the Basis of Sex” (as Jane Ginsburg), and “Vice” (as a young Lynne Cheney).
Since that breakout year, she’s added a number of other prominent credits, including Lily in 2020’s “The Craft: Legacy,” Priscilla Presley in the 2023 biopic “Priscilla,” and, most recently, young photojournalist Jessie in the Alex Garland dystopian drama “Civil War.” That last film was Spaeny’s second time working with Garland, as she’d previously played the character Lyndon in the writer-director’s 2020 sci-fi miniseries “Devs.” This was the show that kicked off Spaeny’s TV career. Since then, she’s played the tragic character Erin McMenamin in the HBO crime drama “Mare of Easttown” and Anna Eleanor Roosevelt in the 2022 Showtime anthology series “The First Lady.”
Few details about the “Alien: Romulus” story are available at this time, but we do know a little bit about Spaeny’s Rain character. Along with the rest of the core cast, she grew up as part of a burgeoning interstellar human colony and has a sibling-like relationship with her childhood friends. “All their parents probably worked on the same ship when they were kids, and that’s how they got to know each other,” Álvarez revealed to Entertainment Weekly. The director previously told the same outlet that he had Spaeny in mind from the very beginning, saying, “I almost wrote the movie for her.”
