(Credits: Far Out / 01 Distribution)
Tue 7 April 2026 5:00, UK
Hollywood is a playground full of nepotism, each actor seemingly connected to another by family ties or very close, generation-spanning friendships. It’s rare you’ll come across a star these days who doesn’t have a connection to someone already established in the industry, even if their occupations are slightly different.
If you thought Gracie Abrams came out of nowhere with her sub-par singing and dull-as-dishwater songs, don’t feel stupid, because, of course, she’s the daughter of director JJ Abrams, the man behind several Star Wars movies. Even Nicolas Cage isn’t safe; his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, and unsurprisingly, heartthrob Timothée Chalamet’s grandparents, uncle, parents, and sister all have strong ties to Broadway and Hollywood.
On the other hand, Lily James, the British star of everything from Disney’s live-action Cinderella and Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver to the hit musical sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, and the controversial TV series Pam and Tommy (Pamela Anderson was not impressed), isn’t actually the daughter of some mega-famous parents. While her mother, Ninette Mantle, is an actor, she’s never remotely reached the heights of her own daughter, who made her TV debut in a 2010 adaptation of Just William opposite Daniel Roche, also known as Ben from Outnumbered.
Rather, her nepo connection is a little more distant, wherein her grandmother, Helen Horton, who passed away in 2007, several years before James began her career, had a long history in the theatre, appearing in a handful of TV shows and movies, too. Most excitingly for James, Horton lent her voice to the artificial intelligence character known as Mother in Ridley Scott’s Alien, and while she wouldn’t be born for another ten years in 1989, James grew up with the knowledge that her grandma had lent her voice to one of the most iconic and influential sci-fi movies ever made.
Thus, when she began working with stars in the industry, she always had this hidden fact to whip out and impress people if need be. In particular, she knew that she had to let a certain filmmaker know, what with him being a huge cinema buff, and that was Edgar Wright.
James revealed her fun family fact to him while auditioning for Baby Driver, with the actor telling The Independent, “I was watching it recently because I was thinking of Sigourney Weaver as an inspiration for a role I was hoping to play. And I do just stop in my tracks every time, like, ‘My God, this is crazy, that’s my grandma!’”
“The only time I’ve really played that card was to impress Edgar Wright,” she explained. Clearly, it worked. “Like, ‘I don’t know if you know, but my grandmother…’ And being the biggest film obsessive, and having seen everything, he just thought it was so cool!”
Alien really changed the game when it was released in 1979, coming right as the horror genre was starting to develop into something simply unprecedented. It was a complex take on human frailty and the fight to survive in a world increasingly at threat, and Scott wanted to essentially make a slasher set in space, taking inspiration from both The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Star Wars.
Its female characters were pretty revolutionary, too, with Weaver playing final girl Ripley, who was initially going to be a male hero. Interestingly, the film has taken on a strong feminist interpretation since it was released, and the presence of Horton’s Mother alongside Ripley only adds to this.
