Her agent texts us: “She’s coming.”
Then, minutes later, her publicist writes: “No. She is not coming. Spoke to her just now. Her stylist and glam are not responding. She’s also very sick.”
It’s the day of the photo shoot, and the star of FX’s would-be summer smash is missing. Sydney Chandler, who plays Wendy on “Alien: Earth,” is supposed to appear on Variety’s cover with her co-star Timothy Olyphant and the show’s creator, Noah Hawley. One day before the shoot, though she had agreed to be photographed, Chandler made it known (through reps) that she wasn’t willing to participate in the kind of video interview that is the standard ask at Variety — as at other publications. Prolonged negotiations continued until the morning of the shoot.
At first, one of Chandler’s reps voiced the actor’s concern about playing a game with “two older men” (in other words, her co-star and showrunner, who are, respectively, 57 and 58). The game, the comic test “How Well Do They Know Each Other?,” seemed innocuous to us — everyone from Ariana Grande to Ryan Reynolds to Daniel Craig has done it in the past. But to demonstrate good faith, we offered to show Chandler sample questions. Then, she sent a list of ones we’d never ask. (We don’t ever offer question approval, and there’s good reason why: “How many ‘Alien’ films are there?” was high on Chandler’s list.) After that, she changed her mind and decided a game on video wasn’t something she felt comfortable doing at all. Now, on the morning of the shoot, after some convincing from her agent, we hear she will come. Then Chandler decides, after all that — never mind, she can’t make it.
Evan Mulling for Variety
It’s a fact of life for magazine journalists that dealing with talent can be a roller coaster; no shoot is ever easy. Chandler, at 29, is just emerging, having grown up adjacent to the industry, but not in it — her father, with whom she recorded her audition tape for “Alien: Earth,” is Emmy winner Kyle Chandler, but the actor and his wife, Kathryn, raised Chandler outside Austin, not in Los Angeles. In our first conversation, before the shoot — she was enthusiastic about the show, if clear-eyed about how challenging the production had been. So all of this comes as something of a shock: What happened?
“I’m just a private person,” she says in a subsequent phone interview. She says her opting out was simply drawing a firm boundary, not a response to any problem. “I’m new to press — it’s a bit out of my comfort zone. I was more than happy to talk about anything and everything about the show; that’s what I’m here to promote.”
Hawley, the veteran TV creator who’s made five seasons of “Fargo” for FX, is also dispirited by Chandler’s absence from the shoot. “The show is built around Sydney’s character, and the work she did as a professional was tremendous,” he says afterward. “I’m disappointed that my female-centric show, based on a female-facing franchise, does not have my lead actress on the cover. It felt awkward to be there with Tim without her.”
He tells me he hasn’t talked to Chandler about her decision. “I tend to feel like that promotional relationship that everybody has with the Disney Corporation is their own,” he says. “I don’t have to showrun the publicity.”
What’s too bad is that Chandler is really, really good as Wendy — a hybrid being who is designed to look like an adult woman while possessing the consciousness of a child, and is making her way within the universe of one of the most important film franchises of all time.
Chandler is now the star of a series that FX hopes will be the next “Game of Thrones” or “The Last of Us.” Like those shows, “Alien: Earth” remixes familiar IP and lands, world-conqueringly, with a Xenomorph’s claw in both prestige TV and genre fare. Hawley estimates he’s spent eight years thinking about the project, from initial conversations before the rights were available to, when we first speak in June, a race to complete effects by the Aug. 12 premiere. For FX, enjoying the halo effect of recent smashes like “Shōgun” and “The Bear,” this could be the capper on one hell of a hot streak.
And for Chandler — well, the first “Alien” film, in 1979, turned Sigourney Weaver from day player to icon. (Of Chandler, Hawley says, “She’s truly a star,” amid his disappointment about the cover shoot, “and the world is going to see that.”) But for now, she looks to the forthcoming barrage of press — including at Comic-Con this week — with trepidation and curiosity. “How can I best help to represent the truth of this show and the pride that I feel for everyone involved in it?” Chandler asks rhetorically. “Because it was such a long shoot, and we put so much into it.”
Chandler’s Wendy — named by Hawley for the young explorer who finds herself in Neverland — is the next generation’s answer to Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. In the early “Alien” films, beginning with Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” Ripley is drawn into conflict with rapacious extraterrestrial beings. Now, in the franchise’s first television offering, similar creatures crash-land on Earth from a spaceship and crawl and slither into a future version of our world, dominated by cutthroat corporations such as the one that designed Wendy as the next step in human consciousness.
Set in 2120, two years before “Alien,” the series poses a nightmarish question: What if the aliens who’ve spent 46 years stalking through our imaginations came down to Earth? Then, cleverly, it sets up larger inquiries about the threats we create for ourselves.
Among Hawley’s not-so-far-fetched embroideries on the “Alien” universe is that the world is now directly governed by megacorporations, all competing to come up with a way to transcend human life through human-machine hybrids. “All I tried to do,” says Hawley, “is think one or two steps ahead. Is it realistic to think that billionaires are going to be trillionaires? The planet is heating up, and the seas are going to rise — it’s going to be a hot, wet planet that we live on.” Olyphant (the show’s most recognizable name, as the Emmy-nominated star of “Deadwood” and “Justified”) plays a cyborg working to remake humanity in his image, in conjunction with kid-genius corporate overlord Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin, in an inspired turn as a tech-industry brat king who looks painfully familiar).
“You’re born, you live, you die,” Olyphant’s Kirsh tells Wendy, describing the quotidian life of a mere human. Despite getting a chance to transcend mortal life, she still remembers her family, and her quest to reunite with her brother (Alex Lawther) reminds her of her ties to humanity. Two threats close in on her: the need to eventually decide which side she’s on — and, also, the aliens.
What’s it like taking the lead in a franchise known for its feminist icons? “For my own mental well-being, I had to step away from thinking about those expectations and that pressure that I was putting on myself,” Chandler says. “People are going to love it, people are going to hate it — that’s how it works. I had to separate myself from that.”
“Alien,” like the Xenomorph itself, has proven surprisingly resilient; after four films led by Weaver and released between 1979 and 1997 (and two little-loved “Alien vs. Predator” sidequels in the aughts), Scott returned to make two yearning, philosophical prequels in 2012 and 2017. Just last summer, “Alien: Romulus” ditched Scott’s late-period theorizing and embraced the series’ gnarly creature-feature side, making $350 million globally and earning an Oscar nomination for its visual effects.
“Alien: Earth” is a brave new world indeed: It abandonsplot elements introduced in Scott’s prequels and exists in parallel to “Romulus.” “Everything doesn’t have to fit together the way you expect from Marvel,” FX Entertainment president Gina Balian says. “Fans don’t expect that in this universe. It doesn’t have the same pressure.”
That’s not to say there’s no pressure at all. Bringing the franchise to TV — with the investment that implies — represents a not-insubstantial risk for a network that, some six years after entering the Disney stable, is riding high. FX demonstrated its capacity for major-scale storytelling with last year’s Emmy juggernaut “Shōgun,” a massive bet that paid off. Now, it’s hoping for a similar result from a project that will, inevitably, be scrutinized by franchise superfans. “It was exciting — it feels like a good fit, but it could be a total disaster,” Olyphant says about boarding the project. “That’s a very exciting place to work from.”
Hawley says that eight years ago, FX broached the idea of an “Alien” series, and he immediately began generatingconcepts he never expected to use; at that time, Fox’s “film studio was not interested in sharing the brand with the TV side,” he says. But that was before 20th Century Fox, which made the original “Alien,” and FX were subsumed by Disney. After the 2019 merger, Hawley’s dream project became something the new company “was excited about,” he says.
David Zucker, the longtime chief at Scott’s Scott Free Productions, remembers that around the 2012 release of prequel “Prometheus,” he received inquiries about TV adaptations of both “Alien” and “Blade Runner.” “For obvious reasons,” he says, “it was just not a place we were at all keen to go.” Then, it was thought that golden-goose film properties lost their luster on TV, particularly since the money and technology weren’t there to make them cinematic. “Ridley directed two of the most iconic titles in that genre’s history,” Zucker says. “The last thing we wanted to do was to produce anything conventional. What takes this forward? What’s the original vision?”
Patrick Brown /FX
But FX leadership, especially given the potential of reteaming with Hawley, was persistent. In 2020, the network reintroduced to Hawley the notion of working on an “Alien” show, thanks in large part to his success in adapting “Fargo” into a series that had the flavor of the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning Midwestern noir, but a character all its own. Through it all, FX chairman John Landgraf had been courting Scott over a series of lunches, confident that Hawley was the man for the job.
“Noah makes these things that always have something to say and have real substance,” says Balian. “But he’s also a fanboy.”
Hawley, a cerebral Sarah Lawrence graduate who’s published six novels on top of his work in TV and film, found a special appeal in just how uncharted the “Alien” universe was. “There’s surprisingly little mythology across seven movies,” he says. “It was great to not have to jerry-rig a mythology into what’s existing, but to just start again.” Hawley cites “the three main branches of science fiction — ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Alien’ — you would never confuse one for another.”
The series introduces bleeding-edge concerns about capitalism and the future of an overheated planet. “No writer of Noah’s caliber isn’t cognizant of the things we’re grappling with,” Olyphant says. “Storytelling, regardless of if it’s futuristic or if it’s historical, is always going to be about the time in which it’s written as much as the time in which it’s set. Noah’s writing about what he sees in front of him.”
But the Xenomorph is there, along with several new wild flights of fancy. A child’s mind in a grown-up body is a potent symbol, one Hawley says was inspired in part by observing moments of both immaturity and surprising maturity in his own kids. But it also teeters on the edge of bad taste, given the enigmatic ethical issues around depicting a kid’s mentality in an adult’s anatomy. (In a scene in the pilot, Wendy cups her new breasts and declares “These are weird!” — Chandler makes the moment land.) “There was some, let’s say, caution on the FX side around this idea.” Casting and then coaching the adult actors playing Wendy and company toward compelling performances as children was, Hawley says, “what I’m, in many ways, proudest of.”
There are, too, several new and giddily deployed bits of nastiness. (As someone who wears glasses because I cannot fathom touching my eye to insert a contact lens, one invention especially made me squirm.) “There’s so much in the Giger and Ridley representations of this creature that are penetrative, uncomfortably sexual,” Hawley says. “But it’s familiar now to us. I want you to have the feeling that you had watching those first two films. And I can’t get that feeling of discovery back unless I introduce new creatures where you have no idea how they invade your personal space.”
These inventions were not always easy for the actors to stomach. “I don’t like creepy-crawlies,” says cast member Babou Ceesay with a laugh. “Insects. Goo!” He recalls doing an initial screen test with Cameron Rodger Brown, who plays the alien when it’s being shown in real space, not represented by CGI: “I see a guy in a suit, and then he’s on the stilts, eight feet tall, and the extra mouth comes out, and my reptilian brain goes, This is dangerous.”
Danger comes at a cost too. In the wake of the maximalist “Shōgun,” FX had a certain readiness to spend. (Various European locations were considered, for instance; Bangkok was chosen for its available studio space.) But the production — halted in its early stages during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 and restarted six months later — was simply enormous: “Compared to the scale of ‘Shōgun,’” Balian says, “this is bigger.” (For comparison’s sake, “Shōgun” was reported to have a $250 million budget; FX declined to comment on what “Alien: Earth” cost.)
FX
Andy Nicholson, the series’ production designer, beams with pride as he describes his reverence for the first film, and his attempt to match its“retro-futurist” look (the way that a late-1970s viewer imagined the future). But he’s open about the challenges of the production as well. “They were shooting in three different studios on up to 20 stages at a time,” he says. “Between studios, it took an hour and a half. I spent nine months in a van doing this every day.”
Thailand’s florid weather also helped conjure a grunginess “Alien” fans, accustomed to spaceships in disrepair and a vision of the future as an unpleasant place to be, will appreciate. “Bangkok has a patina — the mold growing everywhere,” Nicholson says. “That was great.”
The efforts of craftspeople like Nicholson reflect the show’s general attitude — working in the spirit of “Alien,” but not trying to re-create it. Nicholson and his colleagues puzzled out the dimensions of the Nostromo, the spaceship from “Alien,” by analyzing photos of the actors on set and working out their heights. “You study something, you absorb it and then you develop it for what this script is,” he says.
The addition of Wendy and her lost boys — in a funny bit of corporate synchronicity, the human children watch Disney’s “Peter Pan” as they’re uploaded into robots — mirrors Hawley’s treatment of the source material too. The hows and whys of cyborgs are not explained in “Alien,” but the subject is essentially of “Alien,” and AI characters are present throughout the franchise; Hawley used the opportunity to dig into the ramifications of an element on the story’s fringes.
Olyphant sees the series as, intriguingly, its own thing. “When we were doing ‘Deadwood,’” he says, “I was like, Yeah, it’s a Western, but I’m not sure it’s a Western. I went into this thinking, It’s quote-unquote ‘Alien,’ but I’m not sure it’s ‘Alien.’” In short: “If you take the monster away,” he says, “you still feel like you got a good story.”
As a sheriff on “Deadwood,” a deputy U.S. marshal on “Justified” and (again) a U.S. marshal on Season 4 of “Fargo,” Olyphant has leveraged his rugged lawman looks and sly, undercutting wit to traverse all manner of American landscapes. Exploring a scaled-up future world on “Alien,” he was surprised at the autonomy with which Hawley got to operate.
On previous projects, Olyphant says,”you can feel the presence of outsiders meddling and noodling with lots of opinions. I never felt that on this job.” Olyphant told Hawley that to inhabit his robotic character, he wanted to bleach his hair. “The conversation was with Noah,” Olyphant says, “and no one else. I was working for him and only him.”
All of which contributed to the sense that the series was doing something genuinely new. “I loved that Noah did not try and re-create the movie,” says Chandler, who describes herself as a “sci-fi nerd.” “He was honoring all of the best parts of the film and made his own creation.”
When she first read the script, Chandler responded by doing something a little rash. “I called my poor agent and explained that I’d like to go to Canada,” she recalls. “‘Do you think I could go knock on Noah’s door?’”
That was in March 2023, and Hawley was filming Season 5 of “Fargo” in Calgary. Chandler would later learn that she and Hawley both live in Austin, but knowing that wouldn’t have mattered — this conversation couldn’t wait. She already had an offer for a major role in a feature film. But “being able to dive into Wendy,” she says, “was going to be much more of a challenge, in a beautiful way.” The actor was a known quantity at FX, having played rock star Chrissie Hynde in the 2022 limited series “Pistol,” and she’d had a supporting role in the film “Don’t Worry Darling.” But Wendy would be a leap forward for Chandler, and she knew it; she and Hawley went to dinner, and afterward, she sent in her tape.
Patrick Brown
It was a surprisingly easy road to “yes,” Hawley recalls. “John Landgraf thought she was a star. It was a friendly room; we were rooting for her. She’s so present in every moment.”
But once Chandler finally got to set, she felt the weight of the production. (Chandler filmed from February to July 2024.)“You hit a point on a long shoot where exhaustion creeps in and you’re hanging by a thread,” she says, “but you’re still giving everything that you can for the passion of the job.” Chandler was still fairly green, but the scope of the production might have stymied any performer. “We had around 600 people on set every day — the call sheet was a book.”
Growing up, Chandler had wanted to be a writer, rather than an actor. “That was my dad’s arena,” she says. Her early life was spent outside the spotlight, so much so that a quick Google search turns up a LinkedIn page for her, with refreshingly un-nepo-baby postcollege jobs like barista listed as recently as 2018. She fell in love with acting only during a theater class she’d taken on a whim, during one emotionally demanding scene: “My brain is quite an explosion most of the time, and it was the first time, maybe ever, I felt an intense calm and quiet in my head.” Once she got the “Alien” role, Chandler attempted to study child psychology and even took a children’s karate class. “None of that had gotten me anywhere,” she says, “except creating a massive ball of anxiety in my stomach.” She sat down to write, and placed three words on a sheet of paper to describe how children behave: “observant,” “instinctual” and “honest.”
Chandler strikes this writer as unusually observant, both of the climate on set and of her micro-reactions to it — like another writer. “If you’re not working with a certain amount of chaos, in my opinion, something’s wrong,” she says. “I find that I am calmest when I’m working in choppier water.” And at moments, she allowed instinct to take over, as when she’d break into exercise before scenes to connect with her physicality. “I was the weird one doing 20 push-ups and 20 jumping jacks before a take.”
Chandler wasn’t the only one feeling the heat: Hawley attempted to shoot what he could during the early days of 2023’s dual strikes, with all eight scripts written and much of the cast covered by the U.K. based union Equity, rather than SAG-AFTRA. After two or three weeks of production in late July 2023, the show shut down in August until the strikes were resolved.
“I wouldn’t say it was frustrating,” Hawley says of his feelings about the writers strike. “I certainly believed in the cause.” Hawley says he felt obligated to try to keep the project from falling apart: “I needed to balance my own beliefs with the legal liabilities, and the roles that I have as a producer, as a director, as a writer.” He was among a group of showrunners who, in September 2023, four months into the strike, approached WGA leadership about the stalled state of negotiations, shortly before the strike was resolved. “It turned into a little more of a contentious process,” he says, “but I do think by asking those questions, we did bring about a swifter resolution to the strike than would have happened otherwise.”
For Hawley, his passion stems in part from the time he’s invested. “I still really can’t believe this show is going to come out,” he says. “A significant part of my life has been spent making these eight hours.” It’s been almost a decade: from the first glimmering idea, back when the “Alien” franchise was inaccessible to him, to the show’s launch. Keeping a level head throughout was his goal. “Thailand is a Buddhist country,” he says. “It’s a very kind, respectful place. I started to say, ‘The Thai way is my way.’ Every day we’re going to do something impossible, but we’re not going to be stressed about it. We’re just going to go make something that will look like it cost twice what it actually cost.”
Should “Alien: Earth” earn a second season, though, Hawley is hoping the production can move. “Season 1 is the proof of concept,” he says. “And if it works commercially, then Season 2 is about building a model upon which we can envision making a Season 3, 4, 5.” He describes Bangkok as “a challenging location for a number of reasons — the health and well-being of your crew; my ability to participate.” Citing “Wednesday” (which moved between seasons from Romania to Ireland) and “Game of Thrones” (which came to have units in several locales while based in Belfast), Hawley hopes to have conversations “about the best route forward in producing the show.”
What will play out remains to be seen. “Noah’s in that thinking process about what it could be,” Balian says about a hypothetical Season 2. “There are a lot of places that could stand in for where the show could go next.”
Say this much though: “Alien: Earth” is “designed to be a recurring series. I don’t know how many seasons that would be,” Hawley says. “I believe that endings are what give a story meaning, so I have a sense of where I’m going with it.”
Chandler, too, hopes for another round as Wendy. (While I’ve seen only six of the season’s eight episodes, and don’t know her fate in a cruel universe, Hawley tells me, “The show is built around Wendy!”)
“I learned a lot from this character, and she taught me to listen to my gut, to stand up for what I believe is right, and honor what you know your body is telling you,” she says during our second conversation. Given the context of this chat — happening after the photo shoot fell through — the subtext seems, well, not like subtext at all. “She gave me a lot.”
Including her prerogative to walk away from a cover shoot and let her words speak for themselves. For now, Chandler is taking a moment to catch her breath, hang out with the two cats who’ve joined her household and think about just what Wendy showed her. “You step off a job like this and question: Who am I? Where am I? What just happened? Then you see the end result and find a pride in that as well.” She pauses. “Yeah,” she says. “With difficulty comes growth.”
Styling (Olyphant): Grace Olyphant; Styling (Hawley): Emily Bogner; Grooming (Olyphant): Barbara Guillaume/Forward Artists; Grooming (Hawley): Caysi Jean/House of Rae Tallow; Cover (Olympant): Thom Browne; Necklaces: John Varvatos; Cover (Hawley): Suit: Alexander McQueen; Shirt: Vivienne Westwood; Watch and bracelets: Cartier; Individual Portrait (Hawley): Suit and shirt: John Kristiansen New York by Suttirat Larlarb; Tie: Celine: Watch; Cartier
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