Alien: Casting, Production Updates on Noah Hawley, FX Networks Series

Posted in: FX, Preview, streaming, TV | Tagged: alien, fx, fx networks, hulu, noah hawley, preview

Here’s a look at what we know so far on the casting and production side when it comes to Noah Hawley (Fargo) & FX Networks’ Alien series.

It looks like FX & Noah Hawley‘s upcoming series take on the “Alien” franchise is going to try to make a go of things, starting production on the series that’s cast with a mix of SAG-AFTRA and Equity members. While Sydney Chandler (Pistol, Sugar) was officially confirmed for the female lead role, Deadline Hollywood reported recently that Alex Lawther (The End of the F*cking World) had been cast as the male lead (a soldier named CJ). In addition, it was reported that Samuel Blenkin (Black Mirror) had joined the cast in the role of Boy Kavalier, a CEO; Essie Davis (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The Babadook, Babyteeth) as Dame Silvia, and Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger) as Slightly. That means any member of the cast who is SAG-AFTRA will be on strike and away from filming until AMPTP returns to the table to negotiate a fair deal with SAG-AFTRA and the WGA.

And based on an updated production listing that hit this week, it appears that the upcoming series will have som additional filming beginning on September 23, 2023 – with “Thailand” and “Eastern Europe” listed:

In an interview with Vanity Fair from Summer 2021, Hawley offered some early insight into the themes that the series will be taking a deep dive into:

Hawley’s Getting Inspiration from The Past: “What’s next for me, it looks like, is [an] Alien series for FX, taking on that franchise and those amazing films by Ridley Scott and James Cameron and David Fincher. Those are great monster movies, but they’re not just monster movies. They’re about humanity trapped between our primordial, parasitic past and our artificial intelligence future—and they’re both trying to kill us. Here you have human beings and they can’t go forward and they can’t go back. So I find that really interesting.”

This Not a “Ripley Story” & Things Are Going To Open Up A Bit: “It’s not a Ripley story. She’s one of the great characters of all time, and I think the story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it. It’s a story that’s set on Earth also. The alien stories are always trapped… Trapped in a prison, trapped in a spaceship. I thought it would be interesting to open it up a little bit so that the stakes of ‘What happens if you can’t contain it?’ are more immediate.”

Hawley Looks to Continue the Films’ “Inequality” Themes: “You know, one of the things that I love about the first movie is how ’70s a movie it is, and how it’s really this blue-collar space-trucker world in which Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton are basically ‘Waiting for Godot.’ They’re like Samuel Beckett characters, ordered to go to a place by a faceless nameless corporation. The second movie is such an ’80s movie, but it’s still about grunts. Paul Reiser is middle management at best. So, it is the story of the people you send to do the dirty work.”

For Hawley, That Means a Focus on the Dangers Human Represent as Well as Aliens: “In mine, you’re also going to see the people who are sending them. So you will see what happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved. If we as a society can’t figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what’s going to happen to us? There’s that great Sigourney Weaver line to Paul Reiser where she says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.'”

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