Deadline reports that Katherine Waterston, of Steve Jobs and Inherent Vice Fame, has been cast as lead character "Daniels" in Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant.


The sequel to his 2012 Alien franchise spin-off Prometheus, Covenant is thought to be the first of a series of films that will tie in to Scott's original 1979 film.

Covenant will follow the (likely doomed) crew of a colony ship that discovers an Edenic world whose only inhabitant is David, the android survivor of the previous film played by Waterston's Steve Jobs co-star Michael Fassbender.

Waterston has had a busy couple of years with high-profile turns in Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's psychedelic tome Inherent Vice, and Danny Boyle's recent Steve Jobs biopic. She'll also be appearing in Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as Porpentina Goldstein, a bureaucrat at the Magical Congress of the United States who "longs to fight for what's right."

Previously titled Alien: Paradise Lost, Scott had to put the Prometheus sequel/Alien prequel on the back burner to work on this fall's sci-fi hit The Martian, but he says that the movie will start filming in February.

While controversial in some circles for asking more questions than answering them, Chris Tilly who said "while the questions they ask early on in proceedings are intriguing, the great majority of them either fall by the wayside or aren’t satisfactorily answered. Worse still, the film is clumsy and heavy-handed when dealing with the twin-themes of faith and religion, the screenplay threatening to collapse under the weights it its own lofty theological ambitions in the final act."