‘It's the best monster ever invented': Noah Hawley on bringing Ridley Scott's Alien to TV

The Guardian

3 days ago

When it was first announced in 2013, the thought of Fargo being reimagined as a TV miniseries felt practically sacrilegious. The 1996 neo-noir starring Frances McDormand as a kindly Minnesota police chief was a singular film that had won two Oscars. Surely its distinctive Coen brothers vibe would get shredded in the woodchipper of TV adaptation?
Back then, Noah Hawley, the screenwriter who took on the job, would have agreed. 'It seemed like such a terrible idea,' he says via video call from a Long Island holiday bolthole. 'Which is sort of why I liked it. The risk/reward was really high.'
If his take on Fargo had sullied the original, Hawley jokes, he would have been 'burned at the stake'. But his approach was more mindful reimagining than direct adaptation, with Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman leading a new small-town tale of malevolence and haplessness that perfectly captured the Coens' essence. Fargo won three Emmys in 2014 – including outstanding limited series – and has continued as a star-studded anthology for another four seasons, with showrunner Hawley finding an intriguing new angle each time.
If taking on Fargo was a big swing, Hawley's latest franchise remix is a literal beast. Alien: Earth is a prequel series to the durable sci-fi franchise that began with Ridley Scott's clammy 1979 horror. Despite numerous Alien movie sequels, crossovers and spin-offs, this is the first time the hissing, nightmarish xenomorph – 'Maybe the best monster ever invented, cinematically,' Hawley suggests – has attempted to colonise TV.
The approach had to be different from last year's successful offshoot Alien: Romulus, a back-to-basics slasher picking up plot threads from Scott's original. 'An Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, so the monsters can just be monsters,' says Hawley. 'But in a 10-hour, 30-hour, 50-hour show the monsters have to exist for a reason. You're also not killing everybody off, so there has to be a continuing serialised story in which the monsters fit.'
With the critical acclaim that greeted Fargo and his 2017 series Legion – a subversive take on the X-Men comic-book mythos that ran for three trippy seasons – Hawley has helped elevate expectations for small-screen offshoots of existing intellectual property. 'The question is always: why are we doing this?' he says. 'And if you can't answer the 'why?' question with something other than 'money' then probably you should stop.' What used to be cash-grab brand extensions now increasingly strive to be prestige projects, as evidenced by recent blue-chip TV efforts such as HBO's The Penguin and politically charged Star Wars hit Andor.
Hawley is technically on holiday when we speak: he, his artist wife Kyle and their two teenage kids have swapped the summer heat of their Austin, Texas base for New York state. The 58-year-old looks beach-ready in a casual short-sleeve shirt, but is happy to dig into the guts of his own summer blockbuster. It has been gestating since 2018 when, after the success of Legion, the FX channel asked how he might approach an Alien show. 'If you ask me if I have an idea, I'm gonna have an idea,' he says.
From the lofty prequel Prometheus to a shlocky crossover in Alien vs Predator, the franchise timeline has become cluttered over the past 45 years. Hawley's pitch zeroed in on unexplored territory: what was happening on Earth in the years just before the events of Alien. The result is a mashup of Peter Pan dreaminess and heavy metal doom, with a sprawling ensemble cast including Babou Ceesay as a poker-faced security officer and Timothy Olyphant as a blond android 'synth'. It is set in 2120 – a couple of years before Sigourney Weaver and her blue-collar crew of space truckers will have their fateful close encounter – and the Earth has, rather plausibly, been carved up by a cabal of all-powerful tech corporations.
Weyland-Yutani, the franchise's longstanding corporate baddy, is obviously in the mix. But a pushy rival called Prodigy has secretly cracked transhumanism, decanting consciousness into powerful synth bodies. The catch is that only young minds are flexible enough for the process, so terminally ill kids are being reborn as herculean but emotionally immature 'hybrids'. 'If you're telling a story about humanity there's nobody more human than a child,' says Hawley. 'They don't know they're bad liars, they can't pretend they're not scared and they learn to be cynical. So that was interesting to me.'
When a hulking research vessel carrying unpleasant cosmic beasties crash-lands on a hi-tech city in Thailand, the hybrids are deployed on a search-and-rescue mission. 'We're fast, we're strong and we don't break,' points out lead hybrid Wendy, played with suitably childlike glee by Sydney Chandler (Pistol, Sugar). The stage is set for a corporate turf war amid a citywide state of emergency.
Coming up with new aliens that could exist alongside the familiar xenomorph was 'daunting' for Hawley. The aim was to evoke the feeling of watching Alien for the first time. 'They don't have to carry the day,' he says. 'They just have to offer that feeling of unpredictability. By introducing these other creatures, I am able to give you a sense of: well, now I don't know what's going to happen.'
After the fraught terrain of Fargo and Legion, where an emotional gut punch never felt far away, Alien: Earth feels like Hawley in a brasher, more swaggering mode. Classic Black Sabbath was a touchstone. 'I wanted this show to be completely entertaining from start to finish,' he says. 'It's complex and layered but it's also a cliffhanger show and you get those big feelings from hard rock and driving guitars. I want you to come out of each episode going: yeah, come on!'
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Hawley was born and grew up in New York City (he has a twin brother, Alexi, who has carved out his own career as a TV writer and producer). It was a creative household: his mother, Louise Armstrong, was a writer, painter and activist; his father trained as an actor. 'We grew up in the West Village in the 70s and 80s when the only people down there were artists,' he says. 'It was not the billionaire row that it is today.'
After studying political science, Hawley worked as a paralegal while also playing in rock bands and dabbling in creative writing. At 27, he had moved to San Francisco and published his first novel. Despite getting a two-book deal he was struggling with the follow-up. 'My editor had left, and the publisher wasn't really interested in the book that I wrote,' he says, 'so I was in kind of a desperate moment.' Helping a friend refine a screenplay led to him pitching and selling his own projects: 'Within six months I went from someone who basically didn't know how I was going to keep the lights on until the end of the year to this whole other career.'
He has continued to write novels in parallel with his showrunner career – his sixth, Anthem, was published in 2022 – and made his feature directorial debut in 2019 with the astronaut psychodrama Lucy in the Sky, starring Natalie Portman. If this magpie approach suggests a certain creative restlessness – he also provided vocals for Legion's spacey soundtrack of retro covers – it has also been a conscious attempt at diversifying. 'It's given me a lot of options, which as an artist translates into a modicum of control over your own destiny,' he says.
One unexpected early influence is British comedy. After studying theatre in London, his father returned with Goon Show LPs that Hawley and his brother could soon recite by heart. 'I just wore those records out,' he remembers. He also devoured NPR repeats of the BBC's 1978 radio adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and enthuses about seeing The Young Ones at an impressionable age.
That meant the casting of Adrian Edmondson as a sinister aide-de-camp in Alien: Earth was a real full-circle moment. 'I told Adrian that there was a moment on The Young Ones [in the episode Flood] that informs everything you need to know about me as a storyteller,' he says. 'It was when his character, Vyvyan, walked into the closet and ended up in Narnia. I must have been in my teens when I saw it and it was such a mind-blowing thing, that you could have magical realism in a comedy about roommates.'
What was it like meeting his childhood hero? 'I've found with a lot of comedic actors that their downtime persona is very different. Adrian is very measured, you know.' Hawley laughs. 'He's much more like his character in our show than Vyvyan.'
Alien: Earth launches 13 August on Disney+ in the UK.