[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Alien: Earth” through Season 1, Episode 7, “Emergence.”]
Noah Hawley’s latest book is a horror story of a different ilk than his latest TV series — or is it? Whereas “Alien: Earth” is chock-full of slimy, savage parasites like the titular xenomorph that don’t think twice before slicing up waves of human bodies, the writer’s 2022 novel, “Anthem,” finds its dread in a cryptic, intangible threat: a sudden wave of teenage suicides. No one thing can explain the nationwide escalation, but an inscrutable symbol is found at the scene of each death, suggesting a link among America’s youth that adults are at a loss to understand.
The main narrative is driven by a group of kids who escape from their rehab facility, guided by the conviction they can put an end to their generation’s “act of collective surrender,” as Hawley describes it. But among the various threads making up his ambitious, enthralling epic, there’s one recurring perspective that comes straight from the author himself. Hawley interjects, in third- and first-person passages as “the author,” to talk about the story, his role in it, as well as his own children, their fears, and his fears on their behalf.
At one point, the author asks his daughter — who’s on “two different kinds of anxiety medication” — why she’s so afraid all the time. “She didn’t want to grow up,” Hawley writes. “She didn’t want to think about the future. I tried to convince her that planning for the future is the only way she’ll have any control over it, but she was skeptical. We were in the middle of a global pandemic, after all. Control, she had learned, is an illusion.”
In his New York Times review of “Anthem,” fellow author S. Kirk Walsh wrote that Hawley’s book works to empower teenagers even as his narrative sees them dying off in droves. “Instead of making teenagers the victims,” Walsh writes, “Hawley gives them agency and power in a collapsing world.”
The same could be said for “Alien: Earth.”
Again, the setting of his story is hostile: a planet that’s intolerably hot, a society controlled by five mega-corporations, and an invasive species capable of ending the human race. Again, Hawley takes a fraught, uncomfortable idea and places it at the center of a sprawling adventure: What if a dying child’s consciousness could be transferred into an enhanced adult body? And what if these “hybrids” were our only chance at avoiding extinction? Again, he centers his story on children.
But amid the many thorny questions “Alien: Earth” has raised in its critically acclaimed first season, one compelling idea is still driving the narrative: These kids aren’t the victims. Sure, some may fall prey to fly-like creatures that digest their food outside their bodies, and others may be manipulated by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and his corporate peers. But the series as a whole is giving Wendy (Sydney Chandler) and her fellow hybrids agency in a world gone mad.
She saved her brother, Joe (Alex Lawther), by ripping a xenomorph in half with her bare hands. She’s working behind-the-scenes to accomplish her own goals, outside the ones set for her by Boy Kavalier, his right-hand synthetic, Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), and Prodigy as a whole. She’s the one who — as revealed in Episode 7, “Emergence” — can communicate with the xenomorphs to the extent they’ll help her instead of killing her. (Well, they could try, anyway). What happens with Wendy and what happens to the world are inextricably tied. Her future is ours.
In an interview with IndieWire, Hawley breaks down why he chose to center kids “at the heart of this story,” what Wendy’s communication with the xenomorph means in that context, and how much she still has to learn in a world she wants to make her own.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
IndieWire: What was your initial motivation to feature kids so prominently in an “Alien” story?
Noah Hawley: Whatever the story is called, I’m always going to be wrestling with the things that are on my mind — as “Fargo” or “Alien” or whatever it is. And I have kids that were, when I started this, let’s say 10 and 15 [years old], and when I ended, [they were] 12 and 17. I’m trying to figure out how to raise them in this crazy world that we’re living in, where technology is running rampant and the planet’s heating up. It’s sort of humanity vs. nature, and then AI vs. humanity, like we’re trapped between the natural world and our technology. That feels a lot like “Alien” to me. It feels a lot like Sigourney [Weaver] realizing that Ian Holm is an android, and now there’s nowhere to go.
The question in an “Alien” movie is, “Will one or two humans survive?” And the question in the show is really, “Will humanity survive?” We know from the “Alien” franchise that humans aren’t the best people. They’re not the best species in the world, morally. So you start to think, “Well, do we even deserve to survive?” And then my thought was, “Well, who’s more human than a child?” Children haven’t learned how to hate, they’re not greedy. Those are things we have to learn to be by becoming adults.
So that’s what was at the heart of it for me, and that’s all part of a process in which you go, “Well, if the show is not about running from monsters week in, week out, then what is the function of the monsters?” Take the monsters out of it — what’s the show? How can we use the monsters to make that show better?
When I watched the series, I was asking questions like, “What are my responsibilities as a parent?” and “Should I even have kids?” Those are heavy, uncomfortable questions for a big, expensive show. What kind of feedback did you get when you first put those ideas out there?
I think that originally, in the abstract, my friends at FX really loved the idea that the show was about something and that the aliens fit into it in a different way than if anyone else would approach it. I think as we got closer to production, as the scale of it became clear, people got nervous. It’s not unusual to get nervous where you’re spending a lot of money and doing something that hasn’t been done before. Those two things combined make people a little nervous, right?
Tend to, yeah.
It’s what we call in this business “execution dependent.” There’s a really terrible version of [“Alien: Earth”] that’s possible, where all the kids are Will Ferrell and the tone is really skewed, and you’re like, “Oh, is it a satire of ‘Alien’?” That was always possible, and people were really nervous about it. I wasn’t nervous about it, but I was aware of the danger. I just thought, “Well, it’s a really interesting challenge that these young actors are going to have to face and me, as their director, am going to have to face,” in terms of getting the tone of it right.
But I knew from watching James Cameron’s movie the tone is already in there. Those characters exist in the franchise already, where you have a child who feels like an adult in a child’s body [in Newt] and then an adult who feels like a child in an adult’s body, in Bill Paxton’s character [Hudson]. They’re just not literalized the way that I’ve literalized them.
Watching “Alien: Earth,” I couldn’t stop thinking about your last book, “Anthem.” This feels like an evolution of those ideas regarding the world kids are inheriting and how they’ll approach the future.
The thing with kids is they’re very open to the world. They’re optimists by design. They’ve grown up with a scale of problems that are solvable. You know, as I write in the last chapter of “Anthem,” when you drive your kids around and they see someone who lives on the street and they’re like, “Well, why are there homeless people?” As an adult, you go, “You just have to get used to that,” right? “We tried to solve it. We couldn’t solve it, I think, it’s just complicated and you’ve got to get used to it.” And kids are like, “I have to get used to that?! That seems crazy to me. Isn’t it better to just solve the problem?”
There’s this lack of cynicism to kids that made me want to put them at the heart of this story — because so much of the story is like Paul Reiser’s character in the second film [Carter J. Burke, who works for Weyland-Yutani] who’s acting out of the worst craven greed and scuzziness. A child sees that, and it is just a different view of the world. There’s a moment in the show where Wendy says, “Don’t say it’s complicated. That’s what powerless people say to make doing nothing seem OK.” So I think that’s part of it: “It’s complicated” is not a good enough answer.
Children’s lack of cynicism really unlocks one of the bigger swings in the show — when Wendy starts communicating with the xenomorph. A kid is going to enter into that relationship differently. What made you want to explore that?
Well, not to refer to the James Cameron movie again, but there’s a moment in which Ripley has entered the egg chamber and she’s holding Newt in her arms, and you meet the Queen for the first time. These drones come in, the xenomorphs come in, and there’s clearly a moment in which the Queen communicates with those drones and they withdraw. That moment always stuck with me because clearly there’s some level of language or communication that’s possible. We just can’t hear it or understand it or whatever. So in a science-fiction story in which we’re doing something no one’s ever done before — creating a synthetic body and putting a child’s mind into it — I just thought, “Well, what if she can hear them?”
Now, she says at one point, “They chose me” — which is not accurate, but it’s how a child looks at it, right? “Well, I can hear it, so that must mean something.” It’s like my daughter became a vegetarian at nine. These are the ages in which children romanticize things: Animals have faces and, “We don’t eat the dog, so why would we eat the cow?” So I think it’s both very naive and also very noble to go, “Well, maybe these are just animals who didn’t want to be brought here, and maybe they’re scared.” As “Alien” movie watchers, we’re like, “No, no, no, don’t get too close.” But on the other hand, we can [understand], “Well, yeah, they’re not evil. They’re just parasites. They’re just animals.” It seemed like a really interesting way to explore this divide between child and adult.
That naiveté also makes it easier for the audience to go along with some of their bad decisions. Adults should know better than to do some of the dumb stuff they do in horror movies, but kids — especially kids in synthetic, superhuman bodies — don’t have as many reasons to be afraid.
They’re also pack animals. They’re subject to shaming, they’re subject to bullying. I find that really interesting. I think part of what made “Stranger Things” such a hit was that very thing you’re talking about: They didn’t all think it was a good idea, but they followed the leader and they were loyal. My hope is that A) this is designed as an entertainment; I want people to be entertained at all times — for the action to work and the horror to work and the sci-fi ideas to be sticky for people. But my hope is also B) that you reach a moment as you’re watching each of these children struggle with a different dilemma of adulthood, and you find yourself watching it for a different reason; you find yourself compelled as much by the character dilemmas as by the creature dynamics.
One big dilemma for Wendy comes in Episode 7 when she sees Isaac’s dead body. She’s shocked by it. When she says, “But we’re premium,” it’s clear she’s been operating under the belief that she’s indestructible, as even regular children often do. But now she knows she’s not.
All of these kids who have been put into these synthetic bodies were sick early on and probably dying on some level. So they have had to face their mortality at an age much earlier than any of us should, and Wendy specifically had to do it. Her father was also too sick to be with her, and her brother was halfway around the world. So her experience of it was super lonely and really kind of difficult.
But now, as she says, she’s the forever girl. They were told that they were immortal, basically. Plus, she is the Wendy Darling. She’s the mother, she’s the big sister, she feels responsible for them. So I think there’s something in this moment of seeing him and realizing what all of us adults instinctively know: We’re all going to die and none of us are safe. That is a version of just the horror of mortality that we all discover at varying ages.
Wendy also acts as a kind of wish fulfillment for kids. She’s physically stronger than the adults around her, and she’s gaining more and more control as the series progresses, to a point.
On the one hand, it’s super-empowering for her — this terminally ill girl who’s had this miraculous transformation into this synthetic being — but she’s also discovering that she doesn’t actually have autonomy because her body is a prototype for a product; that she’s basically owned by this corporation. So it’s empowering for her both to have the sort of power she has over the machines and also the influence she has over the [xenomorph].
But what it brings up, of course, is the fact that she’s a child and she’s basically been handed a bazooka. As much as my 12-year-old son loves playing with swords, you don’t want to give him one. [laughs] You don’t want to give him an actual sword. So she has to learn on the job how to be responsible and the consequences of things.
It’s one thing, in the great pretend-play in the sky, to say, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to have your own xenomorph? It could protect you!” But then you’re like, “Yeah, but those are people’s lives. It’s actually killing people, and there are consequences to all of this power that you have.” That is part of the growing-up parable we’re telling here.
There’s this thing that we did in the Chris Rock season of “Fargo,” this idea that he felt that if he only had more power, he’d be safer, but the reality was the more power he got, the less safe he was in his family. But it’s very hard for people to surrender power because it conflicts with what they think is true. So I think these complex ideas about how to be a person in the world and when to be strong and when to be diplomatic and when to say, “Whatever you want, man,” all those things are what we learn in the journey to adulthood. Just putting a child in an adult’s body doesn’t make them an adult.
“Alien: Earth” is available on FX and Hulu. The Season 1 finale premieres Tuesday, September 23 at 8 p.m. ET.
