Power play
Alien: Earth actor Sandra Yi Sencindiver reflects on her serendipitous journey to joining the cast of the sci-fi horror series, transforming into corporate giant Yutani and the highs and lows of being an actor.
Between filming scenes for the second season of Geek Girl and recording auditions for potential new roles, it’s proving to be a busy time for actor Sandra Yi Sencindiver. She also happens to have had a role in the blockbuster series of the summer, Alien: Earth.
“I feel so fortunate. I’m really appreciating every day right now,” she tells DQ from her London hotel room as she prepares to return home to Copenhagen. “You really have to remember to savour the ups, because an actor’s career has ebbs and flows. Even though you have success, it’s not just a steady road towards the moon. It’s really ups and downs, and you can’t take anything for granted. You really have to remember to enjoy when things are going well.”
In Geek Girl S2, US-Danish-Korean star Sencindiver reprises her role as fashion designer Yuji Lee in the story of awkward teenager Harriet Manners (Emily Carey), who enters the world of high fashion after being spotted by a London model scout during a school trip.
“It is so much fun. It is the loveliest cast,” she says. “They are the kindest, cutest, most grounded people, because in big shows with big stars, there are always a couple of exceptional, eccentric divas. We have none of those on Geek Girl. Even though we have a mad schedule, I still enjoy doing it. And also, it’s so much fun playing that character because she’s larger than life. So I’m enjoying myself.”
However, her role in Geek Girl meant Sencindiver almost missed out on starring in Alien: Earth as Yutani, the head of the Weyland-Yutani corporation.
Set in the year 2120, two years before the original Alien film, Alien: Earth finds the world 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 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.
Initially thinking a role in the series – inspired by the 1979 Sigourney Weaver-led sci-fi horror – would be “out of reach,” Sencindiver was delighted to get the chance to audition. But when the production team enquired about her availability, the fact she had just started shooting Geek Girl meant she wasn’t able to join up with creator and showrunner Noah Hawley and the rest of the cast on location in Bangkok, where the series was filmed.
“I was taken out of the pool, and I was heartbroken,” she says. This was in the summer of 2023. Her friend Diêm Camille, who plays soldier Siberian in the show, then kept her updated on casting as the role of Yutani seemingly went unfilled – before Sencindiver was informed that casting had been paused due to the actors’ and writers’ strikes taking place in the US.
“It turns out, because of the strikes, they stopped all casting on major roles,” Sencindiver says. “I was just like, ‘Oh my God, it’s meant to be.’ At this point in time, all filming had stopped because we didn’t know when the strikes were going to end. Then around Christmas, the strikes ended and I was able to send another tape.”
She then landed a callback with Hawley on Zoom – but as he was needed on set, Sencindiver ended up meeting again with casting director Kate Rhodes James and was subsequently offered the part without meeting the show’s creator.
Landing the role was a dream come true for the self-described “Alien obsessive,” who repeatedly watched Alien’s 1986 sequel Aliens on VHS while she was living living in Greenland.
“It’s one of those films I’ve watched so many times, and as a young girl I was very obsessed with Corporal Hicks,” she says of the character played by Michael Biehn. “He’s one of my huge crushes, and it was actually really funny for me to watch it again as an adult. I’m like, ‘Ah, he’s one of the few soldiers who takes the woman seriously, who listens to her and who’s not misogynistic.’ I had a young feminist outlook already back then.”
After winning the part of Yutani, Sencindiver was then able to travel to Bangkok in March 2024 to meet up with the rest of the cast and crew, some of whom had been attached for almost two years by the time she auditioned at the start of last year.
“I was there for some weeks for prep, and there were a lot of costume tests because they just wanted her to look so exclusive,” she says. “There were a lot of makeup and hair and costume tests, I shot some stuff, and then I was off for many weeks. Because there are so many plot lines, when they didn’t need to film Yutani, I went travelling with my family in Thailand. I went back to Denmark, and then I flew back, did some more scenes, flew back to Denmark, hung out some weeks, came back and then shot the rest of my stuff at the end of May. It was a very demanding shoot – it’s a difficult show to shoot. They’re so ambitious, and there are so many elements that have to come into play. I had it easy.”
In the series – which concludes on FX and Hulu in the US tomorrow and Disney+ internationally on Wednesday – Yutani is largely seen in a boardroom setting, first sending Babou Ceesay’s security officer cyborg Morrow to recover the alien species taken by a Prodigy rescue team back to Boy Kavalier’s Neverland island base. Notably in episode six, she faces Boy Kavalier in person as she tries to hammer out a negotiation to recover the lost specimens.
“When you count how much screentime the character has, it isn’t that much,” Sencindiver says. “But when they started sending us episodes, I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s such a piece of this. Everybody’s talking about ‘Miss Yutani’ all the time. And I’m like, ‘I’m really a part of this.’ So I had another kind of experience when I watched it.”
Playing a character whose name is indelibly linked to the Alien film franchise, Sencindiver describes Yutani as a “chess master playing against another chess master” in her spars with Boy Kavalier – “and they’re all pawns in a game she’s playing. She’s such a powerful person that she doesn’t really think about human life or human worth, has no morality.
“She is just very involved in gaining power, holding on to it, winning over other powerful players and not thinking about what kind of consequences it has for humankind, for actual humans, for her employees. She’s just so detached and removed from everything that’s real. I very much think they’re playing a game and not realising what consequences it has, because they have so many people and layers of wealth and power between them and mortality, actually, which is also one of the huge themes.”
As Yutani and Kavalier casually toss around figures in the billions of dollars, the negotiations reveal Yutani’s determination to recover the cargo taken from her grandmother’s ship (the Maginot) and her belief that the aliens have the potential to “change the game.”
“I very much think of her [Yutani] as a collector of unusual things. You can see it in the way she dresses. They’ve given her very reptilian jewellery,” Sencindiver says of her character. “I also imagine like, ‘Oh, these are medals from foreign planets.’ You collect art, she collects species.”
Helping Sencindiver get into character was the “great collaboration” she enjoyed with the hair, makeup and costume teams. She also leaned on her acting training from the Danish National School of Performing Arts that taught her to build a character from the physical to the psychological.
“We always trained in regards to, how does a person speak? How does a person move? What is the tempo? What is the energy? Where is your weight?” she says. “Noah had written on the page, ‘She walks as if she walks on water’ because she’s one of the most wealthy women in the world. She walks as if she owns a fifth of the world and more of the universe – and that’s because she does. I was like, ‘I’m going to take that and I’m going to make that the character.’ So she moves a little bit reptilian. She walks only to please herself, not to please anybody else.”
She also made Yutani very softly spoken, “because whenever she opens her mouth, she doesn’t have to assert herself, because people will always listen. So she’s a little bit animal, a little bit walking on water, and just very soft, even though she’s sharp as a razor.”
Having started out as a theatre actor in Denmark, Sencindiver made the decision to move towards screen work around 2019, leading to roles in shows including Bedrag (Follow the Money), Bäckström, The Wheel of Time, Foundation and Oxen. Notably, she also had a part in the fourth and final season of Swedish/Danish crime drama Bron/Broen (The Bridge).
“I love all the roles I’ve been offered because they’ve been really good, but I haven’t had the choice. I’m just happy when somebody offers me a part that is decent, and I’ll do the best with it I can,” she says. “Hopefully now I’ll move into a league where I get to actually choose what I want to do – not that I’m complaining at all, because I have really appreciated every single role I’ve been able to play these last five years.”
Sencindiver also has ambitions to write and direct, having made two short films – one of which, Seeking Hwa Sun, was nominated earlier this year for a Robert-Prisen, the Danish Film Academy’s annual awards.
“Now I’m developing a longform art house film. It’s slow development, in the early stages,” she adds. “But this is definitely something I am interested in pursuing.”
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Foundation: Set in a distant galactic future, mathematician Hari Seldon predicts the fall of a mighty empire, and launches a revolutionary quest to save knowledge – and humanity itself – amid cosmic threats beyond comprehension.
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