A lot goes down throughout Alien: Earth's eight-episode first season, and very little of it is pleasant for the people involved. On top of the extraterrestrial horrors, we have AI creations and massive corporations threatening humanity's survival, as humanity once again does its best to out-monster the monsters.
We sat down with five of Alien Earth's principal cast members — Timothy Olyphant, Babou Ceesay, Samuel Blenkin, Sydney Chandler, and Alex Lawther— to find out how they navigated these acting challenges on set.
The following interview has been editorialized and lightly edited for better flow.
"I primarily just wanna play the scene, but I'm also aware that there's things on Noah's mind, and one of those things is that Kirsh represents AI and whether we can really trust it and root for it," Timothy Olyphant (Fargo, The Mandalorian) tells Space.com.
Olyphant plays Kirsh, a synthetic leader who's focused on studying all the alien creatures. "The material gave me a lot of room to play all kinds of big, small, dry, warm." His Prodigy-built character is unlike anyone we've met before in this universe, and should keep viewers guessing his true intentions at every turn.
Babou Ceesay (Into the Badlands, We Hunt Together), meanwhile, had to face the new challenge of playing the franchise's first-ever on-screen cyborg, Morrow. The show cleverly explains how they (and hybrids) differ from synths at the outset to avoid confusing fans. As you'd expect, Cyborgs are humans augmented with technology, and they present a unique acting challenge, sitting right in the middle of the AI-to-human scale.
Ceesay explains all about hitting that 'sweet spot' between being robotic and purely human as the Weyland-Yutani-employed security specialist: "Noah (as a director) actually didn't know much. It's already in the text, just the writing is a gift... I kept that balance in my head, but Morrow, because of all the emotions he's been through, he's trying to keep them as suppressed as possible so he can be efficient, so he can be more like Kirsh."
He playfully adds that we might "get there one day" as the world around us evolves and AI becomes more important. Given the context of Alien: Earth, that final comment feels more like a warning than something to hope for.
Way above Kirsh and Morrow, we find Samuel Blenkin's (Atlanta, Black Mirror) Boy Kavalier, CEO of Prodigy and a young trillionaire mind looking for a new challenge. The show quickly throws viewers into the creation of the first hybrid, a synthetic body housing a human consciousness, but our young genius soon gets more than he bargained for when the USCSS Maginot crash-lands into Prodigy City.
"You have to believe that you're the protagonist," he answers when asked about giving Kavalier a sense of playfulness and frustration; as unpleasant as Boy may come across, there's something more complex about the way he interacts with other beings. He’s on top of everything like you’d expect from a CEO, but he acts and dresses like a kid fresh out of high school. "The big, drapey looks speak so much about the character." Jabbing Olyphant about Kirsh's white hair, he admits he just wasn't "brave enough" to dye his hair.
"I personally feel like the playfulness is there from the start with this character, because you've got the Peter Pan references," explains Blenkin. "He's totally misread that book. He thinks it's about not growing up is the way to go, and if you don't grow up, you don't need to play by the rules... Obviously, the message of that book is that if we don't grow up, we're not capable of loving and empathizing with other people."
About their favorite days on the set of this massive production, Olyphant, Ceesay, and Blenkin simply state, "there are too many," but Ceesay has a strange pick he's happy to share:
"We had a day in Krabi (Thailand) where I was underwater. I don't like enclosed spaces very much, and I had to wear this thing on my head... We had a snake wrangler on set who caught two sea snakes that day, and we're in the ocean... All the things that would've made that day terrible, and we were having the best time."
Avoiding spoilers, Blenkin teases a "business meeting" scene which has the three of them together in a big room: "There was no air conditioning and we were in Bangkok and it was boiling hot, and we still had a brilliant time." Olyphant admits the "shifts in tone and style of performances" (of which there are many) made the project feel really special as the shoot went on.
Front and center of Alien: Earth, we have Sydney Chandler's (Don't Worry Darling, Sugar) Wendy and Alex Lawther's (Andor, The End of the F***king World) Hermit, a sister and brother separated by tragedy. Wendy is a hybrid, which immediately has an impact on her relationship with not only her brother, but also herself, as she navigates being a child in an "adult" body. Moreover, she has to mentor several kids who lack her experience and are thrown right into the action.
Chandler underlines there's an emotional complexity to her that made the role stand out: "There's almost a separation as if she's an older sibling to a younger group of siblings. I think Wendy has a very vast internal landscape, and not many are allowed entry." At the same time, she thinks Wendy got much of her "caring" nature from her brother. But that doesn't mean she's too soft either, as both her and Hermit hit the ground running when the show starts.
Lawther, meanwhile, had almost mirrored challenges portraying the most normal person (if there's such a thing) in the series. "The physical side of things... They play themselves. You have to jump over a stairwell, so you just jump. ("25 times," Chandler interjects.) I was really intrigued that, for Hermit, the story is a human being in a landscape that has robots, human beings acting inhumanely, and also extraterrestrials. It was really intriguing to be the sort of soft human component in that."
The praise from his co-star is glowing, as Chandler adds she thinks Lawther's presence "grounds the show" and brings 99% of the humanity in it.
As to what's next for our two leads, "I think there's another place where this relationship can go, it can go even further," Lawther teases, keeping later developments vague. Chandler, meanwhile, says Wendy lives "very much in black and white," so she'd like to "explore the grey matter."
The pair close out joking about having more "cruelty" and "death and destruction." It's safe to say we get plenty of that during the Xenomorph's first visit to Earth.
Alien: Earth will premiere on Tuesday, August 12, with the first two episodes available to stream on Hulu at 8 pm ET and on the FX linear channel at 8 pm ET/PT, and on Disney+ internationally on August 13. A new episode will premiere each following Tuesday on Hulu beginning at 8 pm ET and on FX at 8 pm ET/PT.
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