Alien: Earth's Story Sounds Absolutely Wild
Noah Hawley's Alien prequel TV series is bringing a whole new meaning to hostile corporate actions when it hits FX and Hulu August 12.
Most of what we've learned about Alien: Earth so far has been incredibly vague. There's an Alien, and it's on Earth, and that's… well, that's mostly about it. But we've just learned when we can expect to actually see it… and also a lot, lot more about its setting in the Alien timeline.
This morning FX and Hulu confirmed that Alien: Earth will premiere this August, alongside a bevy of new images from the show, which begin to lift the lid on the series' premise. Alien: Earth is set in 2120, just two years before the events of the original film, and follows life on Earth as it is dominated by the corporate interests of five governing companies: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. Each of those five corporations in racing to unlock the key to immortality, advancing human longevity through the development of synthetic life and cybernetics. But things heat up when Prodigy's CEO announces that the company has managed to synthesize those two fields and create the very first hybrid form of life: Wendy (played by Sydney Chandler), a human consciousness merged with a synthetic android body.
Alien: Earth First Look Images
Wendy lives in Prodigy City, the company's all-encompassing HQ, alongside other hybrids, preparing to usher in a new age for humankind… which Weyland-Yutani doesn't like very much. So, in what can only be described as an extremely hostile corporate takeover, the company intentionally crashes one of its research vessels, the USCSS Maginot, into Prodigy City, unleashing its surviving Xenomorph passenger, onto Wendy, the rest of the hybrids, and everyone else now trapped in Prodigy City. Oops!
As you can see in all the new preview images above, Alien: Earth has quite the cast, including Andor's Alex Lawther, the legendary Timothy Olyphant, and many more. Here's a full breakdown of the new cast and their roles (including one very interestingly named person at the end):
Sydney Chandler as Wendy
Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh
Alex Lawther as Hermit
Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier
Babou Ceesay as Morrow
Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins
David Rysdahl as Arthur Sylvia
Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia
Lily Newmark as Nibs
Erana James as Curly
Adarsh Gourav as Slightly
Jonathan Ajayi as Smee
Kit Young as Tootles
Diêm Camille as Siberian
Moe Bar-El as Rashidi
Sandra Yi Sencindiver as Yutani
Alien: Earth begins on FX and Hulu August 12, with episodes streaming internationally on Disney+.
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
‘Somebody hug me!' 7 Emmy hopefuls on staying calm, hitting their marks and more
The Emmys' limited series/TV movie acting categories have come to represent some of the best and most-talked-about shows on television, and this year's crop of contenders is no exception. The seven actors who joined the 2025 Envelope Roundtable were Javier Bardem, who plays father, victim and alleged molester Jose Menendez in Netflix's 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story'; Renée Zellweger, who reprises her role as the British romantic heroine in 'Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy'; Stephen Graham, who co-created and stars in 'Adolescence' as the father of a teenage boy who commits a heinous murder; Jenny Slate, who plays the best friend of a terminally ill woman in FX's 'Dying for Sex'; Brian Tyree Henry, who portrays a man posing as a federal agent in order to rip off drug dealers in Apple TV+'s 'Dope Thief'; Elizabeth Banks, who takes on the role of an estranged sibling and recovering alcoholic in Prime Video's 'The Better Sister'; and Sacha Baron Cohen, who appears as the deceived husband of a successful filmmaker in Apple TV+'s 'Disclaimer.' The Times' news and culture critic Lorraine Ali spoke to the group about the emotional fallout of a heavy scene, the art of defying expectations and more. Read highlights from their conversation below and watch video of the roundtable above. Many of you move between drama and comedy. People often think, 'Drama's very serious and difficult, comedy's light and easy.' Is that true? Banks: I think the degree of difficulty with comedy is much higher. It's really hard to sustainably make people laugh over time, whereas [with] drama, everyone relates to loss and pining for love that's unrequited. Not everybody has great timing or is funny or gets satire. Henry: There's something fun about how closely intertwined they are. In my series, I'm playing a heroin addict running for my life, and I have this codependency with this friend … There's a scene where I've been looking for him, and I'm high out of my mind, and I find him in my attic, and all he's talking about is how he has to take a s—. And I'm like, 'But they're trying to kill us.' You just see him wincing and going through all these [groans]. It is so funny, but at the same time, you're just terrified for both. There's always humor somewhere in the drama. Banks: There's a reason why the theater [symbol] is a happy face/sad face. They're very intertwined. Renée, with Bridget Jones — how has she changed over the last 25 years and where is she now with 'Mad About the Boy'? Zellweger: Nobody's the same from one moment to the next, one chapter to the next and certainly not from one year to the next. It's been a really interesting sort of experiment to revisit a character in the different phases of her life. What I'm really grateful for is that the timing runs in parallel to the sort of experiences that you have in your early 20s, 30s and so on. With each iteration, I don't have to pretend that I'm less than I am, because I don't want to be the character that I was, or played, when she was 29, 35. I don't want to do that, and I certainly don't want to do that now. So it was really nice to meet her again in this place of what she's experiencing in the moment, which is bereavement and the loss of her great love, and being a mom, and trying to be responsible, and reevaluating what she values, and how she comports herself, and what's important and all of that, because, of course, I relate to that in this moment. Stephen, 'Adolescence' follows a family dealing with the fallout of their 13-year-old son being accused of a brutal murder. You direct and star in the series. What was it like being immersed in such heavy subject matter? Did it come home with you? Graham: We did that first episode, the end of it was quite heavy and quite emotional. When we said, 'Cut,' all of us older actors and the crew were very emotional. There were hugs and a bit of applause. And then everyone would be like, 'Where's Owen?' [Cooper, the teenage actor who plays Graham's character's son]. 'Is Owen OK? Is he with his child psychologist?' No, Owen's upstairs playing swing ball with his tutor. It was like OK, that's the way to do this — not to take myself too seriously when we say, 'Cut,' but when I am there, immerse myself in it. Let's be honest, we can all be slightly self-obsessed. My missus, she's the best for me because I'd phone her and say, 'I had a really tough day. I had to cry all day. My wife's died of cancer, and it was a really tough one.' She goes, 'The dog s— all over the living room. I had to go shopping and the f— bag split when I got to Tesco. There was a flat tire. They've let the kids out of school early because there's been a flood. And you've had a hard day pretending to be sad?' Bardem: I totally agree with what Stephen says. You have a life with your family and your children that you have to really pay attention to. This is a job, and you just do the job as good as you can with your own limitations. You put everything into it when they say, 'Action,' and when you're out, you just leave it behind. Otherwise, it's too much. Certain scenes, certain moments stay with you because we work with what we are. But I think it doesn't make you a better actor to really stay in character, as they say, for 24 hours. That doesn't work for me. It actually makes me feel very confused if I do that. On the show 'Monsters' I tried to protect Cooper [Koch] and Nicholas [Alexander Chavez], the actors who play the children, because they were carrying the heavy weight on the show every day. I was trying to make them feel protected and loved and accompanied by us, the adults, and let them know that we are there for them and that this is fiction. Because they were going really deep into it, and they did an amazing job. Elizabeth, in 'The Better Sister,' you portray Nicky, a sister estranged from her sibling who's been through quite a bit of her own trauma. Banks: I play a drunk who's lost her child and her husband, basically, to her little sister, played by Jessica Biel. She is grappling with trauma from her childhood, which she's trying not to bring forward. She's been working [with] Alcoholics Anonymous, an incredible program, to get through her stuff. But she's also a fish out of water when she visits her sister, who [lives in a] very rarefied New York, literary, fancy rich world. My character basically lives in a trailer park in Ohio. There's a lot going on. And there's a murder mystery. I loved the complication … but it brought up all of those things for me. I do think you absolutely leave most of that [heaviness] on set. You are mining it all for the character work, so you've got to find it, but I don't need to then infect my own children with it. Sacha, you have played and created these really gregarious characters like Ali G or Borat. Your character in 'Disclaimer,' he's not a character you created, but he is very understated. Was that a challenge? Cohen: It took me a long time to work out who the character was. I said to [director] Alfonso [Cuarón], 'I don't understand why this guy goes on that journey from where we see him in Act 1.' For me it was, how do you make this person unique? We worked a lot through the specificity of what words he uses and what he actually says to explain and give hints for me as an actor. A lot of that was Alfonso Cuarón saying, 'Take it down.' And there was a lot of rewriting and loads of drafts before I even understood how this guy reacts to the news and information that he believes about his wife. Jenny, 'Dying for Sex' is based on a true story about two friends. One has terminal cancer, and the other — your character — supports her right up until the end. Talk about what it was like to play that role in a series that alternates between biting humor and deep grief. Slate: Michelle Williams, who does a brilliant job in this show, her energy is extending outward and [her character] is trying to experiment before she does the greatest experiment of all, which is to cross over into the other side. My character is really out there, not out there willy-nilly, but she will yell at people if they are being rude, wasteful or if she feels it's unjust. [And she's] going from blasting to taking all that energy and making it this tight laser, and pointing it right into care, and knowing more about herself at the end. I am a peppy person, and I felt so excited to have the job that a lot of my day started with calming myself down. I'm at work with Michelle Williams and Sissy Spacek and Liz Meriwether and Shannon Murphy and being, like, 'Siri, set a meditation timer for 10 minutes,' and making myself do alternate nostril breathing [exercises]. Brian, many people came to know you from your role as Paper Boi in 'Atlanta.' The series was groundbreaking and like nothing else on television. What was it like moving out of that world and onto other projects? Henry: People really thought that I was this rapper that they pulled off the street from Atlanta. To me, that's the greatest compliment … When I did 'Bullet Train,' I was shocked at how many people thought I was British. I was like, 'Oh, right. Now I've twisted your mind this way.' I was [the voice of] Megatron at one point, and now I've twisted your mind that way. My path in is always going to be stretching people's imaginations, because they get so attached to characters that I've played that they really believe that I'm that person. People feel like they have an ownership of who you are. I love the challenge of having to force the imaginations of the viewers and myself to see me in a departure [from] what they saw me [as] previously. Because I realize that when I walk in a room, before I even open my mouth, there's 90 different things that are put on me or taken away from me because of how I look and how I carry myself. Javier, since doing the series are you now frequently asked about your own opinions on the Menendez case? The brothers claim their father molested them, and that is in part what led to them murdering their parents. Bardem: I don't think anybody knows. That's the point. That was the great thing about playing that character, is you have to play it in a way that it's not obvious that he did those things that he was accused of, because nobody knows, but at the same time you have to make people believe that he was capable. I did say to Ryan [Murphy] that I can't do a scene with a kid. Because in the beginning, they do drafts, and there were certain moments where I said, 'I can't. It's not needed.' The only moment that I had a hard time was when [Jose] has to face [his] young kid. It was only a moment where Jose was mean to him. That's not in my nature. Henry: I discovered, while doing my series, 'My body doesn't know this isn't real.' There's an episode where I'm shot in the leg, and I'm bleeding out and I'm on all this different morphine and drugs and all this stuff, and I'm literally lying on this ground, take after take, having to mime this. To go through the delusion of this pain ... in the middle of the takes, it was just so crazy. I would literally look at the crew and say, 'Somebody hug me! Somebody!' Stephen, that scene where you confront the boys in the parking lot with the bike, I was just like, 'Oh, my God, how many times did he have to do that?' This kid gets in your face, and I was like, 'Punch the kid!' My heart went out to you, man, not just as the character but as you being in there. Graham: Because we did it all in one take, we had that unique quality. You're using the best of two mediums. You've got that beauty and that spontaneity and that reality of the theater, and then you have the naturalism and the truth that we have with film and television. So by the time I get to that final bit, we've been through all those emotions. When I open the door and go into [Jamie's] room, everything's shaken. But it's not you. It's an out-of-body experience and just comes from somewhere else. Bardem: Listen, we don't do brain surgery, but let's give ourselves some credit. We are generous in what we do because we are putting our bodies into an experience. We are doing this for something bigger than us, and that is the story that we're telling. What have been some of the more challenging or difficult moments for you, either in your career or your recent series? Zellweger: Trying not to do what you're feeling in the moment sometimes, because it's not appropriate to what you're telling. That happens in most shows, most things that you do. I think everybody experiences it where you're bringing something from home and it doesn't belong on the set. It's impossible to leave it behind when you walk in because it's bigger than you are in that moment. Banks: I would say that the thing that I worked on the most for 'The Better Sister' was [understanding] sobriety. I'm not sober. I love a bubbly rosé. So it really did bring up how much I think about drinking and how social it is and what that ritual is for me, and how this character is thinking about it every day and deciding every day to stay sober or not. I am also a huge fan of AA and sobriety programs. I think they're incredible tools for everybody who works those programs. I was grateful for the access to all of that as I was making the series. But that's what you get to do in TV. You get to explore episode by episode. You get to play out a lot more than just three acts. Stephen, about the continuous single shot. It seems like it's an incredibly difficult and complex way to shoot a series. Why do it? Graham: It's exceptionally difficult, I'm not going to lie. It's like a swan glides across the water beautifully, but the legs are going rapidly underneath. A lot of it is done in preparation. We spend a whole week learning the script, and then the second week is just with the camera crew and the rest of the crew. It's a choreography that you work out, getting an idea of where they want the camera to go, and the opportunity to embody the space ourselves. Cohen: That reminds me of a bit of doing the undercover movies that I do because you have one take. ... I did a scene where I'm wearing a bulletproof vest. There were a lot of the people in the audience who'd gone to this rally, a lot of them had machine guns. We knew they were going to get angry, but you've got to do the scene. You've got one time to get the scene right. But you also go, 'OK, those guys have got guns. They're trying to storm the stage. I haven't quite finished the scene. When do I leave?' But you've got to get the scene. I could get shot, but that's not important. Henry: There's a certain level of sociopathy. Slate: I feel like I'm never on my mark, and it was always a very kind camera operator being like, 'Hey, Jenny, you weren't in the shot shoulder-wise.' I feel like such an idiot. Part of it is working through lifelong, longstanding feelings of 'I'm a fool and my foolishness is going to make people incredibly angry with me.' And then really still wanting to participate and having no real certainty that I'm going to be able to do anything but just make all of my fears real. Part of the thing that I love about performance is I just want to experience the version of myself that does not collapse into useless fragments when I face the thing that scares me the most. I do that, and then I feel the appetite for performance again. Do you see yourself in roles when you're watching other people's films or TV show? Graham: At the end of the day, we're all big fans of acting. That's why we do it. Because when we were young, we were inspired by people on the screen, or we were inspired by places where we could put ourselves and lose our imaginations. We have a lot of t— in this industry. But I think if we fight hard enough, we can come through. Do you know what I mean? It's people that are here for the right reasons. It's a collective. Acting is not a game of golf. It's a team. It's in front and it's behind the camera. I think it's important that we nourish that. Henry: And remember that none of us are t—. Bardem: What is a t—? I may be one of them and I don't know it. Graham: I'll explain it to you later.
Geek Tyrant
8 hours ago
- Geek Tyrant
PREDATOR: BADLANDS Director Talks About The Hunter Becoming The Hunted in His New Film — GeekTyrant
Hot off the heels of Predator: Killer of Killers , the brutal animated anthology now streaming on Hulu and Disney+, director Dan Trachtenberg is talking about his next live action film in the franchise, Predator: Badlands , which is going to shake up the franchise in a fun way. Instead of following a new group of humans being stalked, this story centers on a Yautja named Dek, an outcast from his own kind who ends up being the one running for his life. Talk talking about this aspect of the story, Trachtenberg told GamesRadar+: 'I've always been interested in characters trying to prove themselves. The real special of Badlands is that it is not just another Predator movie, and we're not just doing the thing where you cut to the Predator and it kills people one by one. 'Every chapter [in the series] brings its own special engine to the franchise, and the fun of Badlands is really the inversion of it all—that this time, the Predator is the one being hunted, and he is the one needing to prove himself. Badlands is thematically linked to the entire franchise in that way.' The Predator franchise has always thrived on a core idea… survival of the fittest, but Badlands asks what happens when the apex predator is no longer at the top of the food chain, and what he's willing to do to climb back. Dek (played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) teams up with a synthetic android named Thia (Elle Fanning), who appears to be a creation of the Weyland-Yutani Corporatio from the Alien universe. Together, the unlikely pair sets out on a journey to find what's described as 'the ultimate adversary,' all while other Predators are tracking Dek down like prey. The hunter has become the hunted. The script was written by Patrick Aison, with Trachtenberg also on board as producer alongside John Davis, Marc Toberoff, Ben Rosenblatt, and Brent O'Connor. If you've been following Trachtenberg's journey through this universe, this marks his third time playing in the Predator sandbox. His first, Prey , was a prequel set in 1719 that became Hulu's biggest hit on launch. Then came Killer of Killers , which takes the franchise into adult animation territory, featuring three different warriors facing off with the galaxy's deadliest hunter in three differnet periods of time. But Badlands is a redefining take on the franchise. Instead of repeating the familiar beats, Trachtenberg seems intent on cracking the formula open and seeing what else the franchise can be. The decision to center the story on a Predator character, and an outcast at that, is a very cool, interesting, and unique move for the franchise. Predator: Badlands hits theaters on November 7, 2025.
9 hours ago
'Grandpa robber' behind Kim Kardashian Paris heist recalls that 2016 night
Kim Kardashian made a defiant walk into Paris' Palace of Justice in May, to face the criminals who held the reality star at gunpoint and robbed in 2016. The trial's shocking outcome would only prompt more questions. Ten suspects, dubbed the "Grandpa Robbers" by French media because most of them were in their 60s and 70s, stood trial in Paris for the notorious 2016 jewel heist that terrorized the reality star. ABC News Studios' "IMPACT x Nightline: Inside the Kim Kardashian Heist" is streaming only on Hulu. Despite finding eight of the 10 suspects guilty of crimes related to the 2016 heist, the French court allowed all defendants to walk free, with some receiving suspended sentences or credit for time already served. The judge cited the defendants' ages and health concerns as reasons for leniency. Two were acquitted. The crime occurred during Paris Fashion Week in October 2016, when Kardashian was staying at the exclusive "No Name Hotel," reportedly known for hosting celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna. That night, while Kardashian's security detail accompanied her sister Kourtney to a nightclub, the robbers struck. In an interview with ABC News, Yunice Abbas, one of the convicted robbers, said he didn't even know who Kardashian was at the time. "I was always told 'wife of an American rapper,'" Abbas said. The robbers, wearing fake police jackets, first confronted the hotel's night concierge, Abderrahmane Ouatiki. They forced him at gunpoint to lead them to Kardashian's suite. "When you feel the cold steel of a gun on the back of your neck, you have to be calm," Ouatiki told ABC News. "You have to be wise in such situations." The thieves escaped with more than $6 million worth of jewelry, including Kardashian's upgraded 18.8-carat wedding ring from then-husband Kanye West. In their hasty bicycle getaway, Abbas admitted to falling and spilling some of the stolen jewels on the street. Following the verdict, Kardashian, who has become an advocate for criminal justice reform, released a statement. "While I'll never forget what happened, I believe in the power of growth and accountability and pray for healing for all. I remain committed to advocating for justice, and promoting a fair legal system." The outcome of the trial surprised even the defendants. When asked if he expected the lenient sentence, Abbas responded with a simple "No" as he left the courthouse a free man. The unexpected verdict left some questioning the French justice system. "I respect Kim Kardashian, but I call foul. Justice was not served," legal commentator Nancy Grace told ABC News. "They should be in jail for what they did."
