10 questions for Sigourney Weaver

 Sigourney Weaver is a movie star, but she still answers her own door on Halloween night. Not long ago, when the 61-year-old icon greeted trick-or-treaters, she was met with a family dressed as the cast of Ghostbusters, the now legendary 1984 comedy in which she co-starred.

 

“The father was a big ghostbuster, and the son was one of the ghosts,” she says. “And the mother was dressed as me.” Did they recognise her? Maybe the adults did, but the kids: no way. To them, Weaver says, laughing, “I’m just this woman in her little suit opening the door.”

 

She is pretty unfussy when it comes to fame. From science fiction (the Alien series, Avatar) to silliness (Galaxy Quest), biopics (Diane Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist) to animation (she voiced the spaceship’s computer in WALL-E), Weaver has had a career that straddles genres and seems built on taking herself lightly. In the comedy You Again she was part of an ensemble that included Kristen Bell and Jamie Lee Curtis. Her role as a haughty hotelier who uses the taunting she received in high school to galvanise her career was another chance for Weaver to poke fun at herself.

 

Self-mockery has been a lifelong survival mechanism, one that she adopted as a child, when an early growth spurt put her at 1.7m by age 11 – far taller and gawkier than her classmates and even some of her teachers. But the adult Weaver has a serious side, too. She is an avid environmental advocate and a huge booster of New York State, where she lives and grew up and which she considers the best place on earth. Whether using her star power to do good or downplaying it to hand out Halloween treats, Weaver seems supremely at home in her skin – gawky no more.