Sigourney Weaver has revealed piloting an X-Wing fighter in Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu was one of the "coolest things" she's ever done.

The Alien star joined the Star Wars universe for the first time playing Colonel Ward opposite Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin/The Mandalorian and she's confessed slipping into a pilot's uniform and getting behind the controls of an X-Wing was a career highlight.

She told the BFI: "I never choose a job for the character. I choose it for the story and I figure I can figure out how to make my part work.

"Our director Jon Favreau and I kept building up Colonel Ward, finding out specifically who she was and who she is.

"To then become a pilot and fly an X Wing is, to me, what she really did during the rebellion. It was one of the coolest things I've ever gotten to do."

Sigourney - who has also appeared in the Alien and Avatar franchises as well as spoof film Galaxy Quest - went on to explain why sci-fi movies continue to appeal to her.

She told the outlet: "I'm always fascinated by what we have humans doing in the future because it hasn't happened yet. We're all looking out into space, thinking: 'Who will we be there? How will we live? How will we get along with our neighbours who have more than one head, or tails, or whatever?'

"Because that hasn't happened yet, that's still ahead of us. So I feel like anything in the future is going to feel more relevant to me."

Sigourney's most famous sci-fi role was playing Ellen Ripley in the Alien movies and she previously reflected on how she thinks the franchise - which launched in 1979 - was "ahead of its time".

Speaking at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, Sigourney explained: "I realise now that it was ahead of its time, unfortunately, as all movies were back then. But I did love the character of Ripley.

"It's amazing to me how influential the character of Ripley has been. I think it's because she reminds us all that we can rely on ourselves, and we don't need a man to fly in and save us or some something like that. Because I do feel that women are the glue that holds the world together, and there it is: I'm just telling the truth."

Sigourney also confessed to being amazed by the success of the Alien movies. She shared: "The writers had done this cool thing. It was a script with 10 men, I think, and so they decided to make it a coed group in space, like dirty truckers in space.

"And they thought that the audience would never suspect that the young woman was going to be the hero, essentially the survivor. So they really did it for story reasons - we weren't doing it as a big feminist step forward, [although] it did somehow turn out to be that [way]."