David Jonsson detached his retina while fighting facehuggers on the set of Alien: Romulus | SDCC 2024

Everyone knows that facehuggers should be avoided at all costs, right? want to fight them? Not David Jonsson, who plays Andy in Alien: Romulus. Apparently Jonsson had so much fun fighting them over and over again that he accidentally detached his retina while filming a scene for the movie.

During a panel at San Diego Comic-Con last night, the group on stage was asked if they had any tips for avoiding facehugger attacks. Jonsson responded that, first, being a synthetic person helps (his character Andy is a synthetic person), but second… he's failed to do just that.

“I don't want to give it away, but there's a scene in there where I do something relatively cool with the facehugger,” he said. “So I wanted to do it over and over again. So they let me do it over and over again.”

Jonsson goes on to say that they had different sized facehuggers to work with at different moments, and he asked to use the big one. “I turn it around and it hits me in the eye and detaches my retina.”

Thankfully, Jonsson seems to be doing well now, but for anyone who gets too worked up while fighting these scary guys, this is a cautionary tale.

Speaking of facehuggers, everyone who attended that panel at SDCC last night got to see a whole lot of them, in a series of footage shown only in the room, as well as facehuggers handed out to panelists at the end. The movie comes out soon, on August 16, 2024, and yes, there's a crazy bucket of popcorn.

You can read all the announcements about SDCC 2024 here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN. Have a story tip? Send it to [email protected].