The unusual cast of Alien

Hey, it was the 70’s, so maybe it wasn’t that unusual, but all of the men in Alien were surprisingly old, at least compared to what I would speculate would be the case now: at the end of the year of it’s release (1979), they were, in order:

• John Hurt – 39
• Yaphet Kotto – 40
• Tom Skerrit – 46
• Ian Holm – 48
• Harry Dean Stanton – 53

There’s only two guys on that list who were younger then than I am now. Harry Dean Stanton is just shy of 90 these days.

The two female actresses, Veronica Cartwright and Sigourney Weaver, were both 30, which seems not entirely out of line with what casting for the movie might look like today.

Has our movie culture just become that much more youth-obsessed in the intervening decades?

(Incidentally: one of the members of the “World Securty Council” in The Avengers was played by Jenny Agutter)