Alien: Earth’s Noah Hawley on Big Swings in Elevated Sci-Fi

Noah Hawley regards a fresh idea much like an Alien: Earth character encountering a new creature: with curiosity, caution, and patience.

“When an idea is new, you don’t want to look it in the eye, you know? You sort of want to let thoughts occur and kind of side-eye what it’s seeming like it wants to be,” the showrunner of the FX/Hulu series said.

“You don’t want to say it out loud too early, because it’s like a soap bubble. The earliest version of an idea is very fragile. … And the moment people impose any kind of critique or even a look, you can lose faith. So I really try, in the early stages, to just let it be what it what it’s going to be, not force it. And then, after a period of time, you start to write things down, and you start to feel like, OK, there’s something there that makes sense now.”

Since its debut in August, Alien: Earth has become a critical and audience favorite, holding a 95% “fresh” rating on RottenTomatoes.com. Set two years before the 1979’s classic sci-fi horror film Alien and roughly 60 years before the events of its acclaimed 1986 sequel Aliens, Alien: Earth is a prequel with bite like the xenomorphs drooling in the promos.

“This is a show that takes such massive swings that the first few hours are almost disorienting,” said RogerEbert.com. “But once you get on its wavelength, you won’t want it to end.”

Here, Hawley shares the inspiration behind such swings and how to ground a story, even in an elevated universe.

New Creatures and Complications

Hawley has a knack for spinning inventive stories out of existing intellectual property (IP). He wrote and created the Marvel Comics-inspired psychological thriller series Legion and spun off the 1996 Oscar-winning film Fargo into a crime-anthology series that won seven Primetime Emmys over five seasons.

Alien: Earth expands the world first imagined in director Ridley Scott’s film, nodding at its best elements while ruminating on “the notion of humanity undone by its own arrogance and ambition.” Weaving “philosophical depth” with “intense action and bone-chilling imagery,” the show delivers jolts and scares through new monsters like a scene-stealing skittery eyeball. (“There’s a lot of KY,” Hawley said of all the goo.)

Yet the series doesn’t just follow characters stumbling across a creature only to be picked off while they scheme to survive. Rather, itdissects a future where immortality itself is a commodity.

Earth in this future no longer has nations but five corporations and varying degrees of humanity. People such as the medic Hermit (Alex Lawther) coexist alongside cyborgs, such as the security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay), and robots (“synths”), such as the white-haired Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant).

In the series premiere, billionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) engineers something new: a hybrid combining a synthetic or artificial body with human consciousness. Kavalier, who “acts like a cross between a barefoot Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Frankenstein,” appeals to the parents of terminally ill children for this experiment, resulting in Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and the Lost Boys, named after Kavalier’s favorite story, Peter Pan.

Wendy has the mind of Hermit’s twelve-year-old sister but superhuman strength and other abilities. As these children figure out how to be adults and whether they should be human or not, Kavalier sends them to the crash site of a research vessel to rescue people by income level and collect whatever specimens they can.  

“Pure Possibility”

Although Scott is an executive producer on Alien: Earth, neither he nor other execs gave Hawley specific guidelines for the series beyond setting the show on Earth. So Hawley wondered: What is Earth at this moment?

“I had an image of 1900: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, the battle for control of what was then futuristic technology, electricity … and the idea that if we could capture a moment like that, it would be very easy for the audience to understand what the world was,” he said.

From there, “my mind went to basically immortality as a product, what’s next for humanity, and the idea that you might end up in this battle between cybernetic enhancement, AI, and then … human minds in synthetic bodies. And because my brain works the way it does, my next thought was, well, what if adult minds are too fixed, so they have to start with children? And that took me to the Lost Boys and Peter Pan.”

Hawley often starts with an image, a character, or a premise and asks, “What if?” He trained that imaginative sense early. As a New York City kid growing up in the West Village, he loved the sci-fi bookstore four blocks from his home. “I like to say I read every book in that store. It’s such a thrilling genre because it really opens you up to pure possibility.”

He loves the original Alien for its “unlikeliness on many levels.” There’s the creative side, with Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s script, H.R. Giger’s creature designs, Sigourney Weaver’s iconic performance, and Scott’s vision, but also the storytelling of this “working-class franchise.”

“There’s something to the mundanity of space truckers for forty minutes and the fact that [Scott] doesn’t build it like a horror movie,” Hawley said. “It doesn’t give itself away early on. It forces you to live in this sort of Waiting for Godot, you know, what’s going to happen while these guys complain about how much they’re being paid. And it walks that line between just a ’70s workplace drama, and then suddenly, one of the greatest monster movies ever conceived. It is very elevated compared to so many things of its time.”

“Real Character Dilemmas That Resonate”

Despite its fantastical elements, Alien: Earth stays grounded in Wendy and the hybrids navigating their identity and a world not far removed from our own.

“I just tried to think one or two steps ahead. Is it realistic to think that billionaires could become trillionaires? Well, yeah, that seems more and more true every day. And is it realistic to think that these corporations, as they amass more and more power, they’re gonna—in the name of stability for the marketplace—begin to take over more political power? Yeah, I could certainly see that. They’re all trending toward monopoly as much as they can,” Hawley said. “So all of that seemed realistic enough that you can watch a show that’s about a hundred years in the future, but it feels like it’s grappling with the things that we’re grappling with today, which I think allows it to feel immediate in a way.”

For Hawley, the elevated genre is “the pinnacle of storytelling,” layering fantastic elements on top of human drama, whether in a show like Severance or films such as Interstellar or Arrival.  

“The key is always that you’re telling a story that feels vital to an audience, that’s rooted in real character dilemmas that resonate with people,” he said. “I think the danger always with genre is that a lot of the time, pure genre writers are not as motivated by character or as talented at character as they are at the big ideas. … If things are too futuristic or sci-fi, it’s kind of bloodless.”

To elevate your own genre story, try springboarding off an existing IP for inspiration. Just don’t squash your ideas before they hatch.

“People have asked me, ‘Why do Alien? Why not do an original story?’ And I say, it is an original story, but I want to reach the largest audience possible,” Hawley said. “If I can tell an original story and call it Alien, why wouldn’t I do that? I get to both have a conversation with a franchise I’ve loved since I was a kid, and also do something that I feel is wholly original. So that’s the challenge of it. Come to these franchises with the idea that you can take a big swing and do something original, and make them stop you. Make them tell you that it’s too original, but don’t censor yourself.”

Season 1 of Alien: Earth is now streaming on Hulu.