Noah Hawley cast Timothy Olyphant in 'Alien: Earth' to make up for 'Fargo' U.S. Marshal role

UPI

17-07-2025

BANGKOK, July 17 (UPI) -- Alien: Earth creator, executive producer and writer Noah Hawley says he wanted to collaborate again with Timothy Olyphant after casting the Mandalorian, Justified and Deadwood icon as another lawman in Season 4 of his anthology drama, Fargo.
"I always assume that if you're talented, you can do anything and, so, I like people to prove me differently," Hawley told UPI during a recent press conference in Bangkok, where the sci-fi drama was filmed.
"And I wanted to make it up to Tim for casting him as the U.S. Marshal the same way that everyone else has cast him as a U.S. Marshal, so I decided to make him a completely different character. He's so versatile and he underplays everything anyway. That wasn't a big step to see him in this role."
Premiering Aug. 12 on Hulu, FX and Disney+ internationally, the eight-episode series takes place two years before the events of the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. The ensemble includes Sydney Chandler, Essie Davis, Samuel Blenkin, Babou Ceesay and Alex Lawther.
"In the year 2120, the Earth is governed by five corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold. In this Corporate Era, cyborgs (humans with both biological and artificial parts) and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) exist alongside humans," according to a synopsis.
Previews have shown the residents -- including a group of exceptional kids -- at the futuristic Neverland Research Island facility trying to find and neutralize the terrifying monsters who escape in a spaceship crash on Earth.
Olyphant plays one of the synthetics, but specific details about most of the characters, including his, have been closely guarded.
"The key has been finding what are the affectations that feel human versus synthetic," Hawley said.
"If you look at the movie, Alien, they made Ian Holm the only British character because then you thought, 'Well, he's not a robot, he's just British.' So, we had to find that with the American version and I like playing against that. Timothy is such an American actor presence."
The new show also reunites Hawley with David Rysdahl, one of the stars of Fargo Season 5.
"He was just, really, a stand-out to me, in terms of the work experience with him," Hawley said.
"I just really like his presence. He's very human. He brings a real warmth and kindness wherever he goes and I like that he has this relationship with these kids that they just really feel cared for," he added. "I'll always call somebody I work with before."
While Hawley took inspiration from Alien and its 1986 sequel, Aliens, he wanted the series to distinguish itself by being the first to actually take place on Earth.
"The first one is such a 1970s movie and the second was such an '80s movie," Hawley said.
"The first film, really, was [about] 'space truckers,'" he added. "It has that blue-collar [feel]. These are people who work for a living. The second film, they're grunts. You introduce Paul Reiser, but he's middle-management, at best. So, I wanted to keep some of that identity, which we get in through Alex's character, Hermit, and the grunts that he is with."
Although it is set in space and in the future, the filmmaker compared the first Alien movie to Samuel Beckett's 1953 play, Waiting for Godot.
"We're going to a place, we don't know where, to do a thing, we don't know what, for people, we don't know who," Hawley summed up the similarities. "There's a little bit of that 'individual getting lost in the system' that I think is a big theme for us."
Hawley also noted that the films were prescient about how powerful technology and corporations might some day become, but even they couldn't have accurately predicted the advances and challenges we are actually dealing with today.
"I don't think that, in the 1980s and the '70s, they could have envisioned the Elon Musks of the world," he said.
"So, corporate, yes, but we're in a different era, and, in order to make it feel contemporary, we needed to sort of address that idea that this whole thing is sort of the whim of this prodigy," Hawley added. "You get in a corporation as a 'diffused decision system' where nobody actually decides and it's nobody's fault."
Hawley, who has also worked on The Unusuals and Legion, said that when he is hired to create a fresh adaptation of a movie or comic book, he studies the original to see how it makes him feel and why.
"Then, I try to make you feel similar things while telling you a completely different story," he said.
"When I look at that first [Alien] movie, it's not just a monster movie. It's about humanity trapped between the primordial, parasitic past and the AI future and they're both trying to kill us," Hawley added.
"Even if I have 60 percent of the best action or horror on TV, I still have 40 percent of, 'What are we talking about?' I like that idea of picking a moment in Earth history, which is a bit like the Edison/Tesla/Westinghouse moment where everyone knows that electricity is the thing and everyone's fighting to control it."
That's where the show -- and real-life society is now -- with artificial intelligence, he observed.
"Everyone's trying to figure out how humanity transcends to the next level of artificial intelligence," Hawley said.
"Is it enhancing the human body mechanically? Or, is it this trans-human idea and, so, that felt like a really interesting conversation to have and then bring the monsters into it because the show, and a lot of science-fiction, is really about the idea of, 'Does humanity deserve to survive?'"
He emphasized that the space monsters aren't the only thing that people have to fear in the Alien universe.
"To be able to bring in, not just the physical or the body horror, but sort of the moral horror of humanity, the things that we do to each other, was really a driving force," he added.