Alien arrival
Alien: Earth showrunner Noah Hawley joins members of the cast to delve into the making of the first television series based on the iconic Alien film franchise, revealing why some of the sets look familiar and why the famed Xenomorphs aren’t the only things to be frightened of.
In space, no one can hear you scream. But now the iconic Xenomorphs first brought to life in Ridley Scott’s 1979 feature film Alien are coming to Earth – and they’re not alone.
After nine entries – and counting – in the storied film franchise, the world of Alien will land on television for the first time in Alien: Earth. It’s a series five years in the making after producer FX Productions first approached showrunner Noah Hawley with the opportunity to bring the movies to the small screen.
A film-to-TV adaptation is fertile ground for Hawley, who is best known as the writer and director behind Fargo, the acclaimed and award-winning TV drama based on the Coen Brothers movie. So when the prospect of an Alien series first arose, he quickly set about imagining a new direction for the franchise.
“It’s been a while. Ridley has made four movies since we’ve been making this series,” jokes Hawley, speaking at the Disney+ European premiere of Alien: Earth in London. “It started for me about five years ago with a conversation with FX when they suggested they could get the Alien franchise for television and did I have an idea.
“The problem with me is if you ask me if I have an idea, I’m going to have an idea. So I came up with this initial concept of the transhumanism, the children in adult bodies, because I feel like Alien was a two-hour survival story but a television show is about the survival of humanity itself, and what’s more human than a child? They don’t know how to lie, they don’t know how to pretend they’re not afraid. So that’s where it started for me.”
The show is set in the year 2120, two years before the original Alien film. The world is governed by five mega corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold. It’s also a world where cyborgs (humans with biological and artificial parts) and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) exist alongside humans.
Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the Wunderkind founder and CEO of Prodigy, unlocks a new technological advancement to create ‘hybrids’ by transplanting the human consciousnesses of terminally ill children into humanoid robots. The first hybrid prototype, Wendy (Sydney Chandler), marks a new dawn in the race for immortality. But when Weyland-Yutani’s mysterious deep space research vessel USCSS Maginot crash-lands in Prodigy City on Earth, Wendy and the other hybrids discover numerous life forms on board more terrifying than anyone could have imagined.
The cast also includes Alex Lawther as Hermit, Wendy’s human brother and a tactical officer and medic who is among the first at the scene of the Maginot crash site; Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, a synthetic responsible for the first group of hybrids; and Babou Ceesay as Morrow, the Maginot’s chief security officer.
Created by Hawley, the show’s executive producers include Scott and David W Zucker, chief creative officer of Scott’s own Scott Free Productions. This certainly wasn’t the first time Zucker had entertained the idea of an Alien TV series, but he saw something in Hawley that finally made the possibility a reality.
“Noah is the type of creator who sees mountain peaks that we can’t bear witness to,” he says. “The experience of making this and watching the process of how Noah works with his team, the ambition, the aspiration, just taking on this kind of IP to begin with, was an extraordinary undertaking. But it’s one thing to create a great pilot. What I think continues to astound me is what an incredible series he delivered. It’s something wholly original and wholly his own.”
Both Chandler and Ceesay admit to watching the first Alien film when they were around the same age – “way too young.” And it wasn’t long before Ceesay found himself face-to-face with a Xenomorph during a pulse-raising scene in episode one. During filming, he remembers squaring up to stunt performer Cameron Brown in an eight-foot costume, “snarling in your face, KY Jelly dripping out of his mouth. Scary!”
The focus on practical effects, puppets and costumes is what made those early Alien films particularly special, and Hawley was keen to repeat the feat on Alien: Earth, which was filmed in Bangkok, rather than relying on green-screen technology to bring the show’s monsters and settings to life.
“It’s meaningful to the cast, and audiences know when something is real or isn’t real,” he says. “We’ve gotten very good at tricking them, but usually what you need is some realistic element in the shot. The thing with horror is your imagination does most of the work for you, so you don’t want to see the monster for too long. You want to see the shadows, you want to see the open door. If the shot is half a second, you’ve got a tail on a fishing line and that’s probably going to work. But the impact on the actors, Alex can tell you, it’s no pretty thing, take after take, to enjoy the experience of the Alien.”
Lawther notes: “It’s really easy to run away scared from a Xenomorph when there’s really a man dressed as a Xenomorph chasing you.”
When he wasn’t being hunted down by aliens, Lawther built a special bond with his on-screen sibling Chandler, even sending her a copy of the song You Are My Sister by Anohni. “I just fell in love with [him,]” Chandler says of her co-star. “I really did. It’s probably very annoying. He sent a song to me and then we started doing little voice notes back and forth, first as us and it turned into our characters talking about the kitchen table or random little memories.”
Lawther wasn’t the only actor who had an influence on Chandler, however, or how she would play Wendy, a child forced to grow up quickly in an adult body – and one of several references to Disney’s Peter Pan. The other hybrids are named Slightly, Smee, Curly, Nibs and Tootles.
“I really feel like Wendy is a collaboration of all the actors,” she says. “I was really able to fall into her as I did a scene with each and every character, each and every actor. Working off of everyone gave me new colours of Wendy each and every time, especially with Alex. He’s Wendy’s heartbeat, but he just made it easy because I fell in love with him. He’s my brother now. She’s a really fun character to play. She’s much cooler than me, which was really fun to play.”
Meanwhile, the barefooted Boy Kavalier runs Prodigy at his whim, without any fear of consequences as money is no object. On finding how to play the character, Blenkin says: “I remember it wasn’t even a shoot day, it was a day zero pre-shoot day, a scene you’ll see in episode two with Essie [Davis], who plays Dame Sylvia in the show. We were first up on the schedule and we got into the room, looked at the chairs. I had my shoes off and you just end up sat in a chair like that [lying sideways] and I thought, ‘That’s the character.’ He walks in and sits wherever he wants, however he wants. He’s a real piece of crap.”
“It was written a little nicer,” Hawley says, “but the sentiment was there.”
As a synth, Olyphant is a stoic presence on screen. “Noah writes these lovely things down. You just memorise them and show up. They tell you what to say, they tell you what to wear, they tell you where to stand. It’s really not that difficult,” he quips. “There’s a tremendous amount of people out there who also did some incredible work. As much as that monster continues to be thrilling, and all the monsters, the performances are the thing and the characters are the thing that really wake you up in the middle of the night.”
While the story might take the Alien franchise in a new direction, one much closer to home, there is no doubt the eight-part series takes its aesthetic cues from the movies, not least the interior of the Maginot. In particular, the opening scenes onboard the ship are entirely a homage to the opening of Alien on the Nostromo. For those on the set of Alien: Earth, it was clear to the cast how much care and attention had been taken by the design team to replicate that same atmosphere and setting.
“It was incredible because you walk into this huge studio and there’s the set of the Maginot, but it just felt like a spaceship, and it also feels like the Nostromo,” Ceesay says. “All of us, 100 people on set, became children immediately, clicking buttons, trying to take pictures, looking at things like we’d never seen it before, incredible. Talking to Mother [the ship’s AI computer], that was my first day on set.”
“Ridley’s reaction was no different to theirs when he first saw it because that was based on his set,” Zucker reveals. “What Noah, production designer Andy Nicholson and his team were able to recreate for the purposes of landing an audience in the original aesthetic of this was extraordinary. I won’t say what his [Scott’s] actual words were.”
When a film is translated to television, the most important element for Hawley is the feeling of authenticity. “[It’s] that feeling that we understand what Alien is and that’s why it was important in the recreation, the homage, the pacing,” he says. “Seeing them [the characters on the Maginot] wake up, seeing the [Robert] Altman-esque overlapping of dialogue at breakfast, they’re smoking, they’re eating. It tells the audience we were making the movie they love.”
“And we did get the actual plans out of the Disney vault,” Zucker adds. “Alright, he [Scott] said: ‘Fuck me, that’s my set.’”
While the production team were able to replicate the look of the original films, it is likely impossible to recreate the same feelings audiences had when they first saw a baby Xenomorph burst out of John Hurt’s chest in the 1979 original or when Sigourney Weaver’s Lt Ellen Ripley first fought the full-sized monster aboard the Nostromo.
That led Hawley to introduce as many as five new alien species in Alien: Earth to offer audiences another round of ‘firsts’ he hopes will both thrill and terrify them.
“In adapting these films, the first thing I do is try to figure out what the movies made me feel and why, and then create those same feeling in you by telling you a different story,” he explains. “The one feeling you can’t produce in an audience is the discovery of the lifecycle of the Xenomorph. We all know it. So that genetic revulsion you felt at every stage is a little muted. The only way to produce it is to create new creatures that you don’t know how they breed or what they eat. That’s why I introduced them.”
But conceiving these new creatures was always about function over form. “We spent a lot of time in the writers room just trying to gross each other out. The one-upmanship was profound,” he says. “The thing for me is comedy and horror are the same: tension, tension, tension, release. So those situations, I knew I had gotten them when I just started to laugh because it felt so awful, and an audience had to experience that, so you’re welcome.”
Set to debut with a double episode on FX and Hulu in the US on August 12 and internationally on Disney+ on August 13, Alien: Earth won’t be short on links to the movies that inspired it. But for Hawley, making the series always came back to ensuring it was about something more than empty shock value.
“Even if you have 60% of the best horror and action around, you still have 40% of ‘What are we talking about? What’s the show about?’ That’s what I’m proudest of, that it’s really the story of where are the grown-ups?” he says. “Here are these children, they’ve been put into these adult bodies, they’re expected to be adults and they’re looking around and their role models really suck.
“So much of what Alien is is the moral horror. Sigourney has this line [in Aliens] that ‘At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.’ There’s something about these children and we’re rooting for them to find their way. I think we all have that feeling in our own lives where we’re going, ‘Where are the grown-ups?’”
Olyphant adds: “It’s just really good, yet it feels about something.”
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