Earth’ star on why she avoids Ripley comparisons (exclusive)

Sydney Chandler knows she’s impulsive at times, but in the case of Alien: Earth, it landed her the job.

The actress, previously seen in the film Don’t Worry Darling and the FX miniseries Pistol, got her hands on the script for the Noah Hawley TV series based on the world of the Ridley Scott horror films. Her father, actor Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights), is the resident World War II buff of her family, and her mother, Kathryn, is a history nerd. But Chandler, 29, has always been the sci-fi fan with her nose in some kind of genre novel.

She heard Hawley, who was busy with FX’s Fargo, was filming in Canada. So as soon as she finished reading the script at 2 a.m. one early morning, she booked a flight to go find him that very day. “I called my agent and I was like, ‘Where’s Noah in Canada? And do you think there’s any possibility he would let me take him to dinner so I can talk to him about this show?'” Chandler tells Entertainment Weekly. “Noah, for some reason, said yes. We chatted for a really long time about story and character and why I felt so drawn to this Wendy character.”

Audiences will meet Wendy on Alien: Earth in the timeline of 2120, just a few years before the launch of the USCSS Nostromo spaceship from 1979’s Alien. In this not-so-distant future reality that’s full of synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) and cyborgs (humans with artificially enhanced body parts), Wendy is a hybrid, a robot infused with human consciousness. More specifically, she has a child’s brain in a bot’s body.

Prodigy, one of five corporations that now govern the entire world (Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold are the others), is the IP owner of hybrids, including Wendy. Hawley further describes his vision of Earth in a separate interview with EW: “Let’s just say the climate predictions are coming true. It’s a hotter, wetter planet. If we just extrapolate where we are now, it’s driven much more by corporations than democracies. It’s very much wrapped up in a competition for technological superiority. The nature of power is, ‘In the end, there can be only one.’ So we’re in the middle of a battle on that level for who has the power in the human race.”

Wendy and the hybrids play into that power struggle, but she physically gets in on the action when a Weyland-Yutani spaceship crash lands in Prodigy City. She and her fellow hybrids are sent to investigate the site, leading to the encounter of mysterious life forms — including one ferocious Xenomorph.

“We started working with the mechanics of how these kids would move physically, and Noah took us more into the mindset space,” Chandler says of stepping into her role as a hybrid. “What is the essence of a kid or a young adult? How do their minds work differently than the adult mind? Kids are so present and they haven’t been battered by the world as much as an adult. So they trust their gut and they don’t second guess.”

Timothy Olyphant, who worked with Hawley on Fargo, also comes into Wendy’s orbit as Kirsh. Hawley declines to divulge much about the character, other than to say, “The look was his idea.” 

Hawley continues, “It’s a very different role for him, but it does play on something that I find so exciting about him as an actor, which is he lives in that space between hero and villain in a really interesting way. When he’s playing the hero side of it, he’s the best guy to strap on a gun and go to high noon.”

Babou Ceesay (known in the U.S. more for Free Fire and Killer Heat) plays another mystery character who’s aboard the Weyland-Yutani ship before it crashes. “He’s definitely related to how the creatures come to this world,” Hawley says. But in the franchise’s grand tradition of fierce sci-fi heroines, first established by Sigourney Weaver with Ripley, Chandler’s Wendy remains at the forefront of what Hawley describes as “a very big, oversized, dramatic story.” 

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“I don’t even want to try to compare my character with Ripley,” Chandler remarks. “That’s just impossible to do. But I hope people like Wendy as much as I love her…. She’s my favorite character that I’ve ever been able to play.”

Hawley elaborates, “I feel like the Alien franchise has a female identity, both with Ripley’s character in the films and then, of course, the fact that the aliens themselves are matriarchal, they have a queen. It feels very much like a female-focused show. Sydney’s character is someone who’s trying to figure out what her role is in this world and, on some level, the age-old question of, does humanity deserve to survive?” 

One of the most memorable moments from 1986’s Aliens for Hawley is Weaver’s line, “I don’t know which species is worse. You don’t see them f—ing each other over for a goddamn percentage.” 

“This idea of the horrible things that we do to each other,” Hawley continues. “Sydney plays a somewhat innocent character who finds herself trying to navigate two kinds of monsters. One is human and the other is from outer space. We do expand on that idea that it’s going to be up to the audience which species is worse.”

Alien: Earth will premiere Tuesday, August 12, with the first two episodes dropping on FX at 8 p.m. ET/PT, and on Hulu at 8 p.m. ET. One new episode will then premiere each following Tuesday.