Cailee Spaeny (born 1998) is the American actress who played Rain Carradine in Alien: Romulus and won the Volpi Cup for Priscilla.
Quick Specs
| Born | July 24, 1998, Knoxville, Tennessee; raised in Springfield, Missouri |
| First screen role | Erica in the short Counting to 1000 (2016) |
| First feature | Amara Namani in Pacific Rim Uprising (2018) |
| Horror centerpiece | Rain Carradine in Alien: Romulus (2024) |
| Also in genre | Lily in The Craft: Legacy (2020); Lyndon in Devs (2020) |
| Award | Volpi Cup for Best Actress, Venice 2023, for Priscilla; Golden Globe nomination for the same role |
| Emmy | nominated as an executive producer of Beef season 2 (Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series) |
Who She Is
Cailee Spaeny was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on July 24, 1998, and grew up in Springfield, Missouri, the seventh of nine children of Mark and Reja Spaeny, in a Southern Baptist family. She trained at Springfield Little Theatre, “six days a week,” and played Dorothy in its The Wizard of Oz. She took up guitar and piano at 11, sang lead in a local band, left school at 13 and performed at the Silver Dollar City theme park in Branson.
At 14 she saw Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, and it became the film that formed her. For four years her family drove her in a minivan to auditions in Los Angeles before she booked work. She released a single, “Fallin’,” in 2016. She keeps her private life private.
The Work, and What She Did in It
Her first screen role was Erica in the short Counting to 1000 (2016). Her first feature was Pacific Rim Uprising (2018), in which she was cast as the female lead, Amara Namani, opposite John Boyega. The same year she played three very different young women: Rose Summerspring, the younger sister in thrall to a cult leader, in Bad Times at the El Royale; Jane Ginsburg, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s daughter, in On the Basis of Sex; and the teenage Lynne Cheney in Vice.
In Alex Garland’s series Devs (2020) she played Lyndon, the youngest member of the Devs team. The Craft: Legacy (2020), a continuation of The Craft rather than a straight remake, gave her the first lead with her name at the top of the call sheet, as Lily Schechner. She called it “the hardest project I’ve ever done.” On HBO’s Mare of Easttown (2021) she was Erin McMenamin, the murdered teenager whose death drives the series.
In Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023) she played Priscilla Presley from 14 to 28, with Jacob Elordi as Elvis and Presley herself as an executive producer. It premiered at Venice on September 4, 2023, and at 25 Spaeny won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress; she was also nominated for a Golden Globe. In Garland’s Civil War (2024) a drama about war photographers, she played Jessie; the film made $122.6 million worldwide on a $50 million budget.
Alien: Romulus (2024) is her horror centerpiece. Fede Alvarez’s film, set between Alien and Aliens, was planned for Hulu and moved to cinemas, opening on August 16, 2024. Spaeny plays Marie Raines “Rain” Carradine, an orphaned miner stuck on the colony Jackson’s Star, whose “brother” is the android Andy (David Jonsson). Her big set pieces are the zero-gravity shootout through floating globs of acid blood and the climax in which she blows the Offspring out into space. The film grossed $350.4 million worldwide on an $80 million budget, second in the franchise only to Prometheus, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.
She followed it as Simone Vivane, a former concert cellist whose career was ended by chronic nerve pain, in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man (2025), and as Ashley Miller in the second season of Netflix’s Beef (2026), on which she was also an executive producer. Her Emmy nomination for Beef is in that producing role, for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, not for acting. In October 2026 she was filming Sean Durkin’s Deep Cuts for A24 in New York, with no release date announced, and she is in the cast of Garland’s A24 adaptation of Elden Ring, shot in the UK in 2026; her character there hasn’t been revealed.
Cool Verified Facts
- Her Pacific Rim Uprising audition tape, made with no props, had her slamming herself to the floor, fighting a pole against a pile of pillows, using a two-foot step stool as her Jaeger and a TV remote as its controls. Director Steven DeKnight and casting director Sarah Finn both say it arrived at the last second, and it won her the part.
- Kirsten Dunst recommended her to Sofia Coppola for Priscilla.
- Before shooting Priscilla she had a four-hour lunch with Priscilla Presley, at which “all my questions went out the window.” The film was shot out of order in 30 days, which in her words meant being “pregnant in the morning, 14 after lunch.”
- Her Craft: Legacy role drew some religious pushback back home: “a little bit of hate… that I was promoting witchcraft.”
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
For Rain she studied Ellen Ripley closely. “I had [Weaver’s] performance playing on repeat for months. I was sort of hoping that something would seep in,” she said, noting that Ripley “wasn’t written for a woman, so there was real freedom” in the part. She deliberately played Rain as Midwestern and blue-collar, like herself.
Romulus was shot on practical sets, in story order. “I don’t remember one green screen on set ever,” she said, and the facehuggers sometimes came flying at her without warning.
She prepares in specific ways: by her own account she researched cults and cult documentaries to build Rose in El Royale, took photography lessons from the set stills photographer Murray Close for Civil War, and deliberately didn’t watch other actresses’ versions of Priscilla.
Why She Matters
Britannica sums up her screen identity as “richly understated portrayals of quiet yet formidable heroines,” a line that runs from Amara to Rain. Coppola said, “She can express so much while barely doing anything… just with her face, her eyes.” In Rain, critic Adam Nayman saw “nothing imitative”: she “occupies Rain… from the inside out.” One review called her “the finest weapon in the arsenal” of Romulus.
By her late twenties she had worked for Coppola, Garland (three times), Alvarez, Rian Johnson, Durkin and Adam McKay, won a major acting prize at Venice, and headlined the Alien franchise’s critical and commercial comeback as the latest heir to Ripley.