Alien: Earth has finally arrived, bringing weekly doses of Ridley Scott’s world of Alien—filtered through the creative lens of Noah Hawley—to sci-fi fans. The first two episodes (read io9’s recap here) had to spend a bit of time doing necessary setup, introducing the characters and how they fit into the story that’ll unfold. So far one of the most unique relationships is the one between Joe, aka Hermit (Alex Lawther) and Wendy (Sydney Chandler), formerly Marcy. They’re siblings, with a twist.
As the episodes explore, Marcy (a very sick child) becomes Wendy (a synthetic body with a human consciousness), but her soldier brother, Hermit, isn’t aware that’s happened. When the two meet—amid a lot of alien-adjacent chaos, naturally—he has to grapple with the revelation that not only is his sister still alive, but she’s also become a hybrid person.
It’s a lot to take in, and speaking to Collider, Lawther—who Star Wars fans will recognize from Andor—described how he approached all those emotions in his performance.
“It’s a moment of horror, I kept on thinking … This person who you thought you’d lost has been found. There’s a deeply unsettling uncanniness to that. And I think for the first takes of it, I was just sort of like—and [episode two director Dana Gonzalez] was like, ‘Maybe turn it down,’ because I just felt sort of freaked out by the whole situation,” Lawther said. “I found it more viscerally frightening than being faced with the Xenomorph, was being faced by a dead sibling come back to life. She’s essentially a ghost to him, and also, she’s in this other body. Can you imagine? Like a zombie, this other body opening its mouth and saying, ‘Hey, man, it’s me. I’m your dead sister. I’m alive, but I’m in a different body.’”
Much like the film franchise that spawned it, not all the horror in Alien: Earth will involve aliens, it seems. However, if you’ve seen the first two episodes, you know there’s also plenty of oozy extraterrestrial terror on the show too. Have you checked it out yet?
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