A young “synth” fights for an alienated Earth

As “Alien Earth” (shown here) arrives, we face two vital questions:
1) What is the future of mankind, in an artificially enhanced world? and
2) Is it wise for an actor to work barefoot?
OK, one question might be more vital than the other, but we’ll ponder both.
“Alien Earth” opens with two episodes at 8 p.m. Tuesday (Aug. 12) on FX, continuing a story that has spanned (directly and indirectly) nine movies. FX will have four of them Tuesday — “Prometheus” (2012) at 10 a.m.; “Alien: Covenant” (2017) at 12:30 p.m., the original “Alien” (1979) at 3 and “Alien: Romulus” (2024) at 5:30.
This is a big venture, producer David W. Zucker said in a Zoom press conference, with “a franchise that’s been around for 46 years. (Fans) have a deep passion.”
Now the first TV-series version has been left to writer-producer Noah Hawley, who has done occasional science-fiction (including FX’s “Legion”) and lots of other things, including the five acclaimed “Fargo” mini-series.
“I’m raising kids in (a time when) the natural world is starting to turn on us,” Hawley said. “The technology we’ve created — the jury’s out on whether that’s going to turn on us.”
So it’s a logical time for a series, he said. The “Alien” movies have often been about astronauts terrorized by monsters. Now “the AI future, we realize, is also trying to kill (people). So humanity is trapped between the AI future and the monsters of the past.”
In the opener, a spaceship — filled with space-creature lab specimens — crashes on Earth. Thrust into the rescue efforts are some new creations: The minds and memories of terminally ill children had been inserted into synthetic bodies that look like young adults.
Leading them is a young woman with the mind of a tween. She’s named herself Wendy, after the “Peter Pan” animated movie she loves.
“Wendy is very much a blank page,” Sydney Chandler (shown here), 29, said about playing her. “You can’t research a hybrid.”
Chandler and her co-stars spent more than six months filming in Thailand.
“There’s a lot of sweat in this show,” said Alex Lawther, who plays the brother of Wendy’s pre-synthetic self. That’s partly due to make-up, “but I’m sure a good 50-percent of that has to do with the 90-percent humidity of Thailand’s climate.”
For Babou Ceesay — who grew up in both England and West Africa and plays Morrow — the heat was familiar. “I love Thailand,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite places on Earth. And I had the privilege of having my family there.”
Most of these actors are relatively unknown. Chandler, for instance, is the daughter of “Friday Night Lights” star Kyle Chandler; her one major role before this was as singer Chrissie Hynde in the Sex Pistols mini-series.
The lone well-known actor is Timothy Olyphant, who was lawmen in HBO’s “Deadwood” and FX’s “Fargo” (the Kansas City season) and “Justified.”
He plays Kersh, a synthetic mentor to Wendy; with make-up, he’s hard to recognize — or to compare to previous synths. “If we bleach the hair, … he’s his own thing now,” Olyphant said. “We can stop the comparisons.”
Then there’s Kersh’s boss: Boy Kavalier is a young tech genius who runs the project that created Wendy That leads to the semi-vital question of working barefoot; two examples:
— When NBC was casting a comedy in 1982, William Devane “had to be considered the leading candidate” to star as the bar-owner, Brandon Tartikoff, then the network programming chief, wrote in “The Last Great Ride” (Random House, 1992).
The show’s creators favored Devane. But he decided the character would be working barefoot; when he accidentally dropped a glass, he had to do the rest of the scene while avoiding shards. He lost the role; instead, Ted Danson spent 11 years starring in “Cheers.”
— For “Alien: Earth,” the boy-genius role went to Samuel Blenkin, also 29.
“We were thinking about maybe this guy just wears pajamas and waltzes around,” he said. “So I think the bare feet kind of stayed on …. We got to the end of the shoot and I realized I hadn’t worn shoes for the whole shoot.”
There were no shards of glass, so all went well. “My feet became leather-hard.”