TORONTO – You might have heard of killer shoes before. Sigourney Weaver’s new movie heels take that to another level.
Weaver, a pop-culture icon who’s appeared in everything from “Alien” to “Avatar,” stars in director Bryan Fuller’s upcoming family horror film “Dust Bunny” (in theaters Dec. 5). She plays Laverne, a mysterious associate to a hitman (Mads Mikkelsen) whose young neighbor Aurora (Sophie Sloan) would like him to take out the monster under her bed.
A bunch of oddball weirdos get involved in the chaos, as does Laverne, and she does not mess around: At one point in the movie, she enters a room wearing shoes with heels that are literal guns. She takes them off, wielding them in a full-on firefight.
Weaver compares her shoot-‘em-up pumps to a piece of art because “they’re so beautifully designed,” the 75-year-old actress says, sitting down for an interview with Fuller a few hours before a “Dust Bunny” midnight screening at Toronto Film Festival. The shoes did require some practice, though, as Weaver not only had to learn to walk in them but also how to shoot them.
“They were so ingenious, like everything in this movie,” Weaver says. “It’s a malevolent, terrible thing that makes perfect sense for Laverne. She’s used them before. She’s going to use them again.”
Fuller says the pistol heels were nearly 4 inches, and Weaver notes they’re “the tallest I’ve ever been on. Certainly since COVID.”
Still, they were not as troublesome to wear as her wool spacesuit in 1999’s “Galaxy Quest.”
“Wool is great. It keeps its shape,” Weaver says. “But then we went out to the desert in Utah, and we were still in wool. I mean, God knows they looked perfect, but boy, it took a lot of maintenance to keep us from looking like we were melting.”
Fuller calls “Galaxy Quest” the “best ‘Star Trek’ movie” but was a fan of many Weaver films when he was younger, including “Aliens” and “Ghostbusters” as well as “Gorillas in the Mist,” “Working Girl” and “The Year of Living Dangerously.”
“Growing up as a queer kid, I didn’t identify with the straight guys. I identified with the strong women,” said Fuller, counting Weaver’s Ripley in that group as well as Wonder Woman and Princess Leia. “People who represented a feminine power that was free of male toxicity allowed a clearer expression of self that we as men are often prevented from accessing.
A lot of fans respond to Sigourney’s roles “because there is a strength and a lighthouse that we flock to because we want a little bit of that power and that shine. And we can’t always give it to ourselves without seeing it in something else. That’s the power of all of these wonderful performances, smart women doing smart things. You rarely played an idiot,” Fuller adds, complimenting Weaver.
“I always felt that Ripley and some of these other characters, we didn’t feel we had the power,” Weaver acknowledges. “We had to convince ourselves as we’re in the moment to just forget about all that and do what had to be done.
“It’s very touching to me that you didn’t see. In a way, you were inspired by the result, but my process as the character was exactly the same, which was this power that I want to have doesn’t exist in this world. I’m not allowed to have this power, but goddammit, I’ve got to take it because it’s the only way I’ll get out of here.“