For decades, Alien fans have known about the Weyland-Yutani Corporation and how they are just as interested in pushing technology forward as they are in making any human sacrifices necessary to turn a profit. The upcoming TV series Alien: Earth marks the first longform adventure for the franchise that takes place on Earth, which includes the reveal that Weyland-Yutani is only one major player in the tech game. A significant faction of the upcoming series is Prodigy Corporation, which is just as passionate to push tech to new heights, though, like Weyland-Yutani, they also aren’t afraid to make some sacrifices along the way. Alien: Earth premieres on FX on August 12th.
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FX describes the series, “In the year 2120, the Earth is governed by five corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. In this Corporate Era, cyborgs (humans with both biological and artificial parts) and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) exist alongside humans. But the game is changed when the wunderkind Founder and CEO of Prodigy Corporation unlocks a new technological advancement: hybrids (humanoid robots infused with human consciousness). The first hybrid prototype named ‘Wendy’ (Sydney Chandler) marks a new dawn in the race for immortality. After Weyland-Yutani’s spaceship collides into Prodigy City, ‘Wendy’ and
the other hybrids encounter mysterious life forms more terrifying than anyone could have ever imagined.”
Playing key members in Prodigy Corporation are Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia, Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins, and David Rysdahl as Arthur Sylvia.
ComicBook caught up with the cast on the set of the series in Bangkok to talk the goals of Prodigy, fitting into the Alien universe, and more.
ComicBook: This Alien franchise, it’s been around for a little while. Made a couple movies, video games, comic books, all that stuff. Before you got involved in this project, what was your connection to the franchise?
Samuel Blenkin: What I will say is that the first film had such a massive impact on me. Well, I feel like it had an impact on everyone because it was … I’d never seen anything like it before. I’d never seen that level of — that imagination stuff. I’ve got a really long connection to sci-fi, so I remember seeing Alien when I was probably a little bit too young, but I loved it. Before that, I was an avid reader of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that aspect of sci-fi, and I really, really loved it. I believe that sci-fi has something very articulate to say about our society and where we’re heading, but when it’s done really well … that film is amazing. So, yes, it lived in my imagination.
Essie Davis: I didn’t watch these films originally in the cinema. My husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, showed me Alien, the first Alien, when we were going out and it blew me away, and then we went on and watched all the rest. I particularly loved the first two films. Randomly, two days before I was sent an audition, we were watching Aliens again, because my daughter was studying it in English, and we were watching it together so she could write an essay on it. Then the script came, and then my alarm went off.
David Rysdahl: I was definitely a fan. I watched it for the first time when I was 12. My cousin, who’s older, took me into the basement with a bunch of the younger cousins and squealed in delight as we all squealed in terror. Then, later, as I got into filmmaking, I started watching them as a filmmaker and just realized how brilliant the movies are. I’m especially a fan — I think all of it’s really interesting, but the first two are really my favorites. I love the humanity in those, too. That first movie feels like they’re just truckers in space, and the idea that they’re just normal people who are dealt this crazy situation, and I love that.
It’s clear that there’s a deep emotional connection you have with it, just as a movie fan, and the themes that it explored. What did it mean to you to enter this world, knowing that, just as a viewer, you had so much connection and reverence for the concept, and knowing that now your daughter is studying it and analyzing it? What has this process been like for you?
Davis: Well, it’s been super exciting, I have to say. Particularly, walking onto set, the first time we saw the alien eggs, it was a little bit like, “Wow!” They were so much bigger than I thought they’d be, and they’ve got amazing, textured skin. I was like, “This thing’s going to open!” I also think they have filmed some sequences of that happening, and the cheers of joy from the camera department, as props smear on some slime, and they open it up, it’s like a crew of fans. It’s hilarious.
Prior to getting involved, what did the series represent to you? Because to some people, it’s just horror movies. Some people, it’s the bigger sci-fi, existential concepts.
Blenkin: This is going to sound strange, but I’ve been thinking a lot recently about interpretation and about the way that interpretation works in entertainment and how sometimes it’s the experience that stays with you. The best art, for me, is not the work that invites explanation or invites interpretation. It’s the work that is just so well told and so vivid that the experience lives with you. That’s all I’m looking for, all I’m asking for from art in general.
What it means to me is the experience of me watching that film and the impact that it had on me. Obviously, looking back now, there are themes there about, basically, the unknown and about how terrifying that is and about knowledge and encountering the unknown and encountering things that aren’t familiar to us, which are themes that we explore in our series and expand upon in a way.
You explaining that reminds me that clip of David Lynch on a talk show where someone asks him to expand on the meaning of Eraserhead and he says, “No.”
Blenkin: It’s different for every viewer, and I genuinely think that’s not the interesting thing about … the explanation is not the interesting thing. It’s about experience for me, personally.
What surprised you about the concept of this show, given what you know and what audiences know about the franchise?
Adrian Edmondson: I think there’s an awful lot of bad sci-fi in the world. I’m not a blanket sci-fi fan. I loved the first Alien, I loved Silent Running, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s about it. Then I read this script, and I thought that is a very cool conceit. I love that idea. Because of our obsession with Peter Pan, the idea of building, taking children away from their home, because Peter Pan is not a good character. Everyone thinks, Peter Pan, he’s a f-cker. He steals children and he takes them away and doesn’t want them to come back, and that’s what this is, dressed up as a business. Weird, eh? I thought that’s worth pursuing.
Davis: Well, I think if I told you, I would be giving something terrible away, so I can’t tell you what my biggest surprise was, but I can tell you that, as a series, you don’t need to have seen the film, because it really does stand alone, but it is very much inspired by them — particularly those first two. It’s set in a 1970s analogue sci-fi world, as opposed to this world. It’s definitely a potential future, but it’s still got plastic buttons and things you have to press to make things happen.
Rysdahl: I think [creator] Noah [Hawley] has a track record of taking iconic movies and breaking them down to their DNA and seeing it through his new lens, and that’s what was impressive with these scripts, in that this feels both like an homage and part of the same universe, but it feels fresh, and it feels like there’s this hybrid, there’s these sciences. It feels like it’s talking about the same conversation about AI that we’re talking about.
We’re at a turning point in human history right now, as humans, and this show is dealing with that through a sci-fi lens. I think Noah’s love of people and his interesting characters, there are iconic characters in this, the same way they’re iconic characters in his Fargo shows. I think if it wasn’t Noah Hawley, I would be more nervous, but I’m like, “Oh, he’s done it. And done it well.”
Blenkin: Just how Noah has managed to honor and stay true to this franchise. It is an Alien franchise and that carries certain expectations, which I think he has honored in such a beautiful way. Well, beautiful is the wrong word, but you know what I mean. In the most horrifying way.
Also, just like all of Noah’s projects, he’s created a cast of really fascinating, interesting characters who are very complex. He’s telling a complex story that is going to go in directions I don’t think any of the audience might see coming, necessarily. Aside from the fact that, maybe in all of the Alien films there is, you know, there’s always a big, shiny black monster. Things are going to go wrong. I think that’s pretty obvious from the outset with our series, but just how he’s taken that franchise, honored it, but also made it his own. I love Noah’s way of storytelling, which is just fascinating and strange and weird characters, putting them in weird, fascinating situations and taking that as far as we can possibly go.
What can you say about your character?
Edmondson: I play Atom. You probably know that, in the future, the idea is that, probably quite a good idea, that — well, an accurate idea, maybe not good — the world will be several multinational corporations and, well, we basically own it. Prodigy owns one of them, and Prodigy is Boy Cavalier’s company, and I’m his absolute right-hand man. To an obsessive point, he’s a vicious enforcer. He understands that Boy is a genius and that he holds the power to make him a lot of money, and therefore does everything he can to crush any opposition or any product.
This isn’t in the script, but when I think of “Atom,” I think of “Atomizer.” He’s a man who atomizes problems. Sometimes quite literally.
Some people might say Prodigy could be a villain–
Edmondson: I’m not a villain.
Right, that’s what I was going to say, is that “villain” is just a matter of perspective.
Edmondson: We’re obsessed with Peter Pan, and we have [productions] of Peter Pan every year. I’ve been in one, I’ve played in it, and there’s a convention that the same actor plays the father in the nursery and then plays Captain Hook, and this kind of duality is what Atom is. He is a kind of father figure but he has the propensity to be a monster, and that’s also what the entire series is about. What is a monster?
Some people might call Atom vicious, but it sounds like a vicious protectiveness.
Edmondson: All sci-fi is about whatever period is written. This one is about now, and we do have problems. Well, we have a conversation going on about the use of AI, which in this is translated into … It’s a Pandora’s box, isn’t it? You can’t close it. It’s translated into the idea of sense and humans in human consciousness in robot bodies and stuff like that.
Then we have to work out, is that good or a bad thing? Everyone agrees hip operations are a boon. That’s good, but when you start messing and putting a human consciousness in another body, is that good for the planet or bad for the planet? Is that the monster? Or is the conceivable alien, is that really a monster? I’m sure the alien doesn’t think he’s a monster. We know from the first Alien film that aliens don’t come from loving families. They grow out of eggs and have to find a human being to come out. I’m sure they don’t think of themselves as monsters.
Davis: It’s a very ethical dilemma kind of world. What is right and wrong? Who is good and bad? Some things are quite obvious, but my character certainly would be a tightrope between her own status, her own position as the top female scientist in biology, and reaching that point and maintaining that point, while having to make compromises, potentially about her ethics, in order to maintain not only that position, but to also maintain care of what she has been doing.
Rysdahl: I think he’s an idealist. He really believes that it’s going to help society, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think he’s in a bubble, and that bubble starts to pop a little bit as he progresses. He’s not just going for a paycheck. He’s a believer.
Do you think your character has taken that responsibility upon herself to do good within the world of Prodigy, and maybe some of the dubious things they might be doing?
Davis: I definitely think that that is her intention. I don’t know whether she fulfills it, but her intention is to hold on to humanity, and the best, most wonderful parts of humanity. The scientific and the creative and the artistic and the potential of human invention.
What was it about your character that you connected with?
Rysdahl: I started with this AI conversation, all the fears and hopes I have about AI as a human. I read a lot about AI, and I’m like, “Oh, it can help change the world and help people and help systems, but also it can be a tool to dehumanize people, to gain control, to unleash corporate greed.”
So for me, that’s where I started, and then I slowly started taking him into the — I was a chemistry major in college, and so I had an old professor who was this lover of science, a lover of ideas, and an absent-minded guy. That’s where I started with him, and he gets in over his head. It’s easy for me, as David, to empathize with him and just to flow with what happens to him and the mistakes that happen.
What did you personally take away from playing this character?
Edmondson: I don’t think you get that until the end of a run, until you see it. Still in the middle of it. I really enjoy the sense of power, because I don’t do that in my normal life. I enjoy the slight fear that he engenders in some people. And I find it surprisingly easy to do.
Rysdahl: It was very easy for me to empathize with Arthur. Also, when I have anxiety, which I do, about the future and these megalomaniacs controlling this amazing technology, it’s rare that you get to put all of that into a creative endeavor. I feel like I can just put all of that into Arthur. The conversations we’re having, Samuel Blenkin — who plays Boy Kavalier — and I, I’ve had so many conversations about all of this, and so it’s just lovely when you get to make something that also you care about in real life, so it has impacted me. It’s also given me a vessel and a conduit to relieve some of my anxiety.
Do you look forward to playing a character like Boy Kavalier because of what you can relate to about him or the ways he’s different from you and challenges you as a performer?
Blenkin: Always the challenge. This is really pushing me out of my comfort zone. I have a tendency to end up playing strange characters, maybe broken characters. Characters that are outsiders. That’s the thing that compels me about acting, is the challenge that you’re talking about. And Boy is … I hope that Boy’s a challenge for me. I hope I don’t have an ego that’s quite as big as his. I definitely don’t have the brainpower that he has, and I’m definitely not verging on sociopathic in the same way that he might be. I’m relishing the challenge of playing somebody who is so different from me.
The franchise is known for people running from a big monster, so even though you’re part of Prodigy, do you still get to do some action-orientated stuff?
Blenkin: I can’t say anything about that, but what I can say is that with the discussions with Noah that I’ve had, we’ve always talked about Boy as somebody who is much more of an artist than a scientist. He has the breadth of knowledge that you need in order to … the depth of knowledge, but also thinking and metaphysical ability. He also has this creative thing which allows him to come at situations from a different angle, redefine what the question is, maybe even redesign the question, which then allows him to come at something from an angle that nobody expected. That maybe goes a little bit towards explaining this meteoric rise that he’s had with his company. Definitely the youngest company by far and now he owns a bit of the planet and he’s barely 20.
Rysdahl: All I can say is when a spaceship full of aliens crashes into the planet, nobody’s safe.
Alien: Earth premieres on FX on August 12th.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter or Instagram.
Stay tuned for more of our Alien: Earth coverage, including exclusive interviews with the cast and crew, by heading here.