Urban legend has it that Michael Biehn, who plays Hicks in James Cameron’s Aliens , was actually paid more money to not appear in the sequel.
However, this is not accurate.
When David Fincher started working on Alien 3 , Michael Biehn found out he wasn’t going to be in the cast. And he was very disappointed.
He then learned by chance, from the producer of a film in which he acted, that the team of Alien 3 had made a bust in his likeness, using an old cast of his face made for Aliens .
David Fincher’s idea was to have Hicks’ character die early in the film by having an Alien emerge from his torso while he was hibernating in the spaceship.
When Biehn discovered this, he was furious.
He immediately called his agent, who called the producers of the film to tell them that they had no right to use Michael Biehn’s image in that way. And it was true. The law had recently changed: it was no longer possible to use an actor’s image like that without his consent.
In the process, David Fincher called Michael Biehn to try to find a solution.
Here’s how the conversation went according to the comedian:
“Fincher said to me, ‘Please, we’d really like to use your character. Can we find a way to…’
I cut him off. I said, ‘First, fuck you for not putting me in your movie.
Second, fuck you for having the nerve to call me that.’ I was really, really angry. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have called him that, because, well, he became David Fincher after that! But I kept going. I said, ‘And third, fuck you for killing my character like that!’
So they gave up on the idea of having an alien come out of my chest. But then they came back with another idea. They said, ‘ We want to use your picture.’ I said, ‘OK, but it’s going to cost you a lot…’
So they paid me a ton of money to put my picture in this movie!
But in the end, it remains a bad memory for me. I could have played in this film and in the following ones, and earned a lot of money in the process.”
Here is the photo of Michael Biehn used in the film:
Not sure it was worth “a lot of money”…