After Earth

EMPIRE TALKS TO ALIEN: EARTH CREATOR NOAH HAWLEY ABOUT MAKING THE XENOMORPH GREAT AGAIN

WORDS JAMES DYER

NOAH HAWLEY IS no stranger to playing with other people’s toys. From his reimagining of the Coens’ Fargo into a quirky anthology series, to his acid-trip X-Men riff with Legion, Hawley has developed a talent for taking a beloved property and twisting it into something entirely new. While Alien: Earth started with an homage to Ridley Scott’s original seemingly ripped straight out of the ’70s, it soon coalesced into its own star beast entirely, as Hawley told a Peter Pan-inspired tale involving hubristic trillionaires, vengeful cyborgs, and a group of children in synthetic adult bodies, led by Sydney Chandler’s Wendy, who might be the most dangerous creations of them all. There have been more than a few awkward misfires in the Alien series, but Hawley’s precision-tooled series proved a sight for sore eyes.

Or should we say eye? Because rather than the familiar Xenomorph for whom the series is named, it was an entirely different foe that captured viewers’ imaginations. Species 64 or Trypanohyncha Ocellus — essentially an eyeball on tentacles — proved the breakout star of Alien: Earth, manipulating human and alien alike for its own oblique ends. “The Eye is the Lorne Malvo of space,” says Hawley, referencing Billy Bob Thornton’s demonic antagonist from Fargo’s first season. “It just wants to create chaos.” Now that Alien: Earth has finished its first season (with more, hopefully, to come), Empire sat down with Hawley for a debrief. Eyeball to eyeball, naturally.

The Eye is one of four new monstrosities you created for the series. What guidelines did you give yourself when dreaming up a group of aliens that could upstage the Alien?

I needed to have this sense of a zoo — I refer in the show to the HMS Beagle and Darwin and collecting specimens from around the galaxy. I settled on four creatures, which felt like it gave me enough of an ensemble that over the course of one or two seasons, you could continue to discover new things. As we see with The Eye, it’s a very strategic thinker. It’s often doing things not to help itself in the moment, but knowing that by destabilising the environment and the humans, it’s going to ultimately get what it wants. This one actually is the one we should really worry about — the others are more like animals, or insects.