Xenomorphs and more invaded the Empire Stage of New York Comic Con today as the cast and creators of FX’s Alien: Earth series took the stage to talk about the recently concluded first season of the Alien film franchise spinoff. Although there was no announcement of a potential second season, the cast and show creator Noah Hawley took some time to discuss their creative journey’s to bring the show to the screen.
“It’s a gift, really,” Hawley stated about being able to create in the Alien universe. “I have a relationship with the movies that I adapt. I do it from place of love. It’s such a joy. When you walk on to that set of the [crashed spaceship] Maginot, which was built t o the specs of Ripley’s Nostromo, it really collapses time. And you see it every time you see an actor walk onto that set for the first time, it’s really humbling.”
Executive producer David Zucker added “I’ve worked in television for twenty-four years. This was a title we avoided because we didn’t think it would be possible on this scale or to have a creator with this kind of vision, much less with a network like FX.
Set a few years before the original Alien film, Alien: Earth opens when a deep space exploration vessel USCSS Maginot crashes into the city of New Siam, which is controlled by the Prodigy Corporation and owner Boy Kavalier. Although the Maginot s owned by rival Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Boy Kavalier decrees that its cargo – a number of exotic and potentially deadly life forms, including a classic franchise xenomorph – to be Prodigy Corporation property, leading to tension between the two corporations. When issues with the aliens escaping containment arise, Prodigy Corporation turns to a group of synethic androids built in part with the memories of dying children known as the Lost Boys to retrievethe creatures before they can do harm.
Sydney Chandler, who plays Wendy, the leader of the Lost Boys synthetics, describes working on the show as “a dream.”
“Noah gave us this freedom to explore,” she states. “I remember early on he said ‘Don’t focus so much on the mechanics of the body, but to find the personality of the character, and where that personality kind of leaks out or overrides the mechanics of this synthetic life and immortal body.’ You can’t research this. So it kind of just boiled down to what it means to be a kid. They’re observant, and they’re brave and they’re honest and they’re instinctual. And I just went from there. Being able to work with this cast, that’s where I found this character.”
Samuel Blenkin, who plays the young head of the corporation that created the Lost Boys, Boy Kavalier, acknowledges that there are certain real-world parallels to his tech genius character. “I think its not a big stretch of the imagination to see where there might be a parallel with what’s happening [currently]. He’s a trillonaire. He looks around in a room and everything he sees is his property. And that was just so fun to play. I walk into a room and look at these guy and go ‘I own you. I made you. And I own you.’ And that was super fun for me.”
With these expansions of the Alien franchise lore, Hawley states that his biggest creative challenge was making sure these elements retained the feeling of dread and terror of the film franchise.
“If I have a skill in adapting these films, its in understanding what the original movie made me feel and why and trying to create it anew by telling a totally different story,” Hawley explains. “And the one feeling you can’t get back from watching the original Alien is the discovery of the life cycle of this creature, how it starts as an egg and ends up a ten-foot tall xenomorph and every step of the way is worse than the one before. So the only way to recreate that feeling was to introduce new characters and you don’t know how they breed or what they eat, so you can get back to that genetic revulsion that we all felt watching Alien for the first time.”
The first season of Alien: Earth is available on Hulu.
