FX’s ‘Alien: Earth’ Could Be Just the Beginning: Creator Confirms Season 2 Can Be Used to Set Up Seasons 3 & 4

Noah Hawley, best known for creating “Fargo” for FX, has been pouring his heart into the new series Alien: Earth, a bold and risky expansion of the famous sci-fi franchise.

The show is led by Sydney Chandler, who plays Wendy, a new kind of character in the Alien world — a grown woman with the mind of a child. But despite how central she is to the show, Chandler was missing from a major promotional photo shoot. And Hawley wasn’t happy about it.

“The show is built around Sydney’s character, and the work she did as a professional was tremendous,” Hawley said later. “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 also said he hadn’t asked Chandler about her choice to skip the shoot, saying, “I don’t have to showrun the publicity.”

That being said, Chandler’s performance as Wendy is already turning heads. Wendy is a human-AI hybrid built by a megacorporation, and she’s dropped right into the middle of a future Earth that’s both terrifying and eerily possible.

FX has high hopes for the series — they’re dreaming it might hit like Game of Thrones or The Last of Us. For them, Alien: Earth could be the crown jewel in a hot streak that already includes hits like Shōgun and The Bear.

For Chandler, taking on the lead in something tied to one of the most iconic franchises in film wasn’t easy. She admitted she felt the weight of expectations. “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,” she said. “People are going to love it, people are going to hate it — that’s how it works.”

The Alien films go all the way back to 1979, when Ridley Scott introduced the Xenomorph and launched Sigourney Weaver into stardom as Ellen Ripley. Now, the series takes place two years before the events of the first movie. The twist is that the aliens come to Earth. They crash-land, crawl through the wreckage, and begin to make their presence felt in a world ruled by greedy corporations — the same ones trying to move past human life altogether.

Hawley explained his vision like this: “All I tried to do 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.”

In this world, Wendy is one of many experiments. She wants to reconnect with her brother, played by Alex Lawther, but she’s also forced to decide where she stands as the situation grows more dangerous, and not just because of the aliens.

The series also stars Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, a powerful cyborg trying to shape the future in his image. Samuel Blenkin plays a young tech genius named Boy Kavalier who pulls the strings behind the scenes. Olyphant described his character’s mindset with a simple line from the show: “You’re born, you live, you die.”

But the production was far from simple. Hawley first dreamed of making this show eight years ago, before FX even had the rights to the Alien universe. That only changed after Disney bought 20th Century Fox and FX. Then the door opened, and FX pitched the idea to Hawley again in 2020. He jumped in immediately.

David Zucker, a longtime executive with Ridley Scott’s production company, said back in the early 2010s, they were not open to doing a TV version of Alien. “For obvious reasons,” he said, “it was just not a place we were at all keen to go.”

The concern was that TV couldn’t do justice to the cinematic feel of the original films. But now, with budgets and technology at a whole new level, things have changed.

FX had already taken a big swing with Shōgun, which had a reported $250 million budget, and Alien: Earth seems to be just as massive, if not more. Much of the show was filmed in Thailand, which presented some challenges, including the climate and the huge size of the production.

At one point, they were using up to 20 different stages across three studios. Production designer Andy Nicholson said he spent “nine months in a van” moving between them every day.

Nicholson also wanted to capture the gritty look fans expect from Alien. He loved how Bangkok’s natural look, the humidity, the mold, the grime fit the style. “Bangkok has a patina — the mold growing everywhere,” he said. “That was great.”

Chandler described the shoot as intense and exhausting. She filmed from February to July 2024 and said, “You hit a point on a long shoot where exhaustion creeps in and you’re hanging by a thread, but you’re still giving everything that you can for the passion of the job.”

Playing Wendy wasn’t easy either. Chandler originally wanted to be a writer. She had regular jobs like being a barista just a few years ago. She only discovered acting in college, and it clicked when she felt a sense of quiet and focus during a theater class. For this role, she tried to dive into child psychology and even joined a kids’ karate class to understand how children move and think. But eventually, she tossed all that aside and wrote down just three words to guide her performance: observant, instinctual, honest.

She added her own rituals too. Before scenes, she would sometimes do push-ups and jumping jacks to get into her body. “I was the weird one doing 20 push-ups and 20 jumping jacks before a take,” she said.

Filming was also interrupted by the Hollywood strikes of 2023. Hawley had all eight scripts written and managed to shoot a little with the U.K.-based actors before the show was shut down for months. He said he supported the strike and believed in the cause, but also felt the pressure of trying to keep the project from collapsing. “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 said.

He was also part of a group of showrunners who urged WGA leadership to find a way forward during the long standoff. “It turned into a little more of a contentious process,” he said, “but I do think by asking those questions, we did bring about a swifter resolution to the strike than would have happened otherwise.”

From the beginning, FX trusted Hawley’s vision. FX president Gina Balian said, “Noah makes these things that always have something to say and have real substance. But he’s also a fanboy.” Olyphant noticed the freedom Hawley had, too. “On previous projects, you can feel the presence of outsiders meddling and noodling with lots of opinions. I never felt that on this job,” he said.

Olyphant described the show as something that can stand on its own, even without the monster. “If you take the monster away,” he said, “you still feel like you got a good story.”

That’s exactly what Chandler felt too. “He was honoring all of the best parts of the film and made his own creation,” she said. When she read the script for the first time, she was so excited she called her agent and asked if she could fly to Canada to talk to Hawley. She didn’t know they both lived in Austin at the time, she just knew she had to play Wendy.

Now, as the Aug. 12 premiere approaches, everyone is hoping that the years of work and risk will pay off. If it does, Hawley hopes to move the production for future seasons. “Season 1 is the proof of concept,” he said. “And if it works commercially, then Season 2 is about building a model upon which we can envision making a Season 3, 4, 5.”

After nearly a decade thinking about the show, writing it, shooting it, and holding it together through strikes and massive production hurdles, Hawley said, “I still really can’t believe this show is going to come out.”

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