Katherine Waterston Starring In 'Alien: Covenant'

This is not a bad year to be Katherine Waterston. The actress broke out last year with Inherent Vice, and since then, she's delivered an emotional performance in Steve Jobs and shot the highly anticipated  Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The actresses' next job? A starring role in Ridley Scott's Prometheus sequel, Alien: Covenant.

Learn more about Scott's film after the jump.

Alien: Covenant is the director's next film, and it'll shoot next year. The Hollywood Reporter says Waterston will star in the sequel, and adds, "the story once again sees a space crew facing the deadly chest-bursting, acid blood-spewing creatures." Waterston, most likely, is a key member of this new crew, and she'll star alongside Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender. This crew will be, according to Scott, introduced in the first act:

It's going to be its own separate thing because they are going to the planet of the Engineers and they are going to see what happened there. It was a disaster. And they will be in that alien craft that takes them there, but with a new group that's incoming, a new group of travelers in the beginning of the first act.

Alien: Covenant isn't abandoning the final scene of Prometheus, in which Shaw says she plans on finding the makers of the engineers they encountered:

You can either say, leave the first film alone and jump ahead, but you can't because it ends on too specific a plot sentence as she says, I want to go where they came from, I don't want to go back to where I came from. I thought the subtext of that film was a bit florid and grandiose, but it asks a good question: who created us? I don't think we are here by accident. I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system. Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don't believe it.

Scott has been open about the film in the past, and how it ties into the Alien universe:

Yes, but it won't be in the next one. It will be in the one after this one or maybe even a fourth film before we get back into the 'Alien' franchise... The whole point of it is to explain the Alien franchise and to explain the how and why of the creation of the Alien itself. I always thought of the Alien as kind of a piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship, which I call the Croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction.

Scott made a wise choice casting Waterston in Alien: Covenant, in a role that Rebecca Ferguson (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation) was possibly wanted for.

Alien: Paradise Lost opens in theaters October 6th, 2017.