“There was something about putting the jacket on that almost like, made me feel like I was throwing my back out. Because when I put it on it just kind of like sucked me into this posture that just became Vickers, and there was just something about that jacket. When I didn’t have the jacket on and we would rehearse Ridley would walk by me and pull my shoulders back, he’d be like ‘you have got the worst posture ever’ and I wold put this jacket on and it was just like, Vickers just came alive.”
—Charlize Theron, Prometheus Screen Test
Lawrence of Arabia leapt to mind when I cast Michael Fassbender because I realized that Michael Fassbender, with blond hair is not the same, but not dissimilar to, and if you were ever gonna redo Lawrence you’d probably certainly want Michael Fassbender to be Lawrence.
And I thought, you get a person, a being onboard the ship who is of serious intelligence, probably an IQ of 225 or 300 he’d wanna definitely entertain himself, and by entertaining himself he would naturally educate himself, by watching everything that’s onboard. So he’s been through the entire library of a million movies. The thing that stuck to mind was Lawrence of Arabia which he plays again and again mainly because he loves the anecdotal thinking of Lawrence himself so we go on out and the line is him saying: “The point is not minding it hurts” when Lawrence burns his finger. Which in a funny kind of way has a kind of loose, metaphorical connection to a person who has no soul, has no feelings and in fact is David. So that’s why maybe he gravitated towards Lawrence because Lawrence, in a funny kind of way while he was a very passionate character also had a degree of a soulless quality to him which made him kind of even more powerful. So I thought it was a good connection.
—Ridley Scott, Prometheus Director Commentary
“Ridley had sort of said that there was this character who was, um, obsessed with sort of Lawrence of Arabia, and I thought that was kind of an interesting area to explore in terms of sort of the femininity of the character I thought could be kinda interesting and to sort of have this androgynous feel to it and then we spoke also about like other influences like early David Bowie. And then the walk I sort of took from Greg Louganis. I remember seeing him in the eighties with my parents we were watching the Olympics. I just thought ‘wow that’s such an unusual walk’, it was such a neutral sort of position when he used to walk to the edge of the board. So I kinda took that, I don’t know, it just sorta popped into my head.”
—Michael Fassbender, Prometheus Screen Test
“I knew that I wanted to be quite soft and feminine. She doesn’t have any vanity, I don’t think she cares so much about, um, beauty and y’know all that kinda stuff. She’s not really into it. When she met Weyland she probably looked really good y’know, that’s apart of her plan, but I think at this mission it’s very practical, so I wanted to have like a hair that we didn’t need to fix. That we could actually y’know if I need to put a skull cap on I can just do it. So it was like, balance between finding something that was quite soft, but not hardcore or boyish or masculine.”
—Noomi Rapace, Prometheus Screen Test
