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- [00:02]
A
I know he's not here, but you see this ball and the game. He called it proof. He said sometimes the world gives you a moment to shine. And if you do well, there's a name for that kind of hero. He called him Mr. October.
- [00:29]
B
Mr.
- [00:32]
A
Welcome to Alien Earth, the official podcast. I'm your host, Adam Rogers, here every week to grow and expand inside the chest of an episode of Alien Earth and then burst outward in a gory shower of insight. This week, episode two. Mr. October, we're full of spoilers, so I'll understand if you bail out, but it would be a mistake because on this episode, y', all, I am verklempt. We have man in Suit to today, my friends, Cameron Brown, the eponymous alien from Alien Earth. After that, actor Essie Davis is here to talk about her character, Dame Sylvia, the hybrid zone, Dr. Frankenstein. And finally, co executive producer Megazi Pensineau is back to talk about, well, death, actually, and whether humans should try to beat it, even if we could. But let's kick off with executive producer and episode director Dana Gonzalez on the literal wind worlds collide vibe of Episode two and that weird Louis Couture's party.
- [01:20]
C
I love Alien just like everyone else who was captivated by it. There's a lot of story. There's a lot of depth to it. I've been working with Noah Hawley since season one of Fargo. Fargo is a remake of a fabled story show and everything, and Alien is another one. There was a lot of people who said, don't do it. But Alien has different voices in the franchise where Fargo had won. You know, the Coen brothers, right, we tried to kind of stay into their filmmaking style and, you know, we didn't want to jump the shark there. It wasn't like we're going to do like this handheld version of Fargo and Alien because you have, you know, the Ridley Scott, the James Cameron, the Fincher. There's definitely different styles and all that. So it was more like, which one do we want to be more like? Right. When you're doing remakes on shows, sometimes directors are like, don't even watch that original movie because I want to do this differently. We never approached it that way. You know, if anything, we were looking at the movies a lot. And then naturally, Alien Earth is. It's a different world. We have different characters, different character development. So now it's like, how can we bring the successful story points that the Alien fans love and those timeless things, the chest burster, all these things, how can we bring those into our world? I think that's how we approached it.
- [02:38]
A
There's kind of a literal moment where those two worlds crash together. The Maginote, the ship that you've created for the show, literally crashes into Earth and it hits the skyscraper on Earth. So there's all the things that we know about aliens, stories that happen on confined spaceships, and now it comes to Earth. How are you thinking about that as a, you know, as a visual moment, as a storytelling moment? Like, okay, now this becomes our alien show right here.
- [03:01]
C
Yeah. You know, that's when some of the creatures and the characters collide. That's kind of our new place. Right. That's now ours. What is that world? It's a lot of water and humid and mold driven and it's ran by corporations. So it's like, you know, we never knew what Weyland Yutani was really. We just. It was just this corporation. Obviously, the corporation 30 years ago was a different interpretation of what we think corporations are today. And then ironically, you have these five billionaires that are running the world.
- [03:29]
A
What could that possibly be like? I have no idea what. That's very relatable, actually.
- [03:34]
C
Yeah. We have this civics thing that's happening in the world, you know, in front of us. That's where you can jump the shark a little bit too, with a franchise. Because everybody's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not in a spaceship. What the hell is that about? And that's where I think we make it our own. We spend a lot of time on the Maginot. In the first hour, we kind of give the audience, ground them into like, here's the alien world that, you know. So we gave them that. And then now we have to tell an eight hour story versus a one and a half to two hour movie. Right.
- [04:05]
A
Well, you have a lot more room to spread out in a TV show and do different or unexpected things. For instance, there's this scene where the rich people are having a Versailles themed party and the xenomorph just wreaks gleeful vengeance against the oligarch. Guys, it's one of my favorite parts. But it's also a look at the socioeconomics of this world. Right.
- [04:22]
C
I mean, that, that building, the rich people live on the top, the poor people live on the bottom. So when that ship crashed and they were subterranean, that was like all the poor people, like the movie Parasite. Right. This is where they live underneath. And then the Lordship, that's the who that guy is, he lives on the 65th floor. And these people don't even know what the hell's going on in the world. And it's so absurd because the ship's crashed in there and he's like, no, no, no, we're having this party.
- [04:46]
A
And, well, and it's dumping the xenomorph into a JG Ballard skyscraper just for a second, as a way to introduce the world, but also to say, here's the class stuff that's in a lot of the Alien movies coming much to the fore. It's going to be a lot more important as the show goes on. So Prodigy is one of the corporations equivalent or co equal with Weyland Yutani running the planet Earth. In this world, Prodigy's run by Boy Cavalier. He's this trillionaire genius, and I want to know, do we actually think he's smart or does he think he's smart?
- [05:16]
C
He's obviously a genius, and I think geniuses can go the wrong direction just as easy as they can go the correct direction, you know, but he's. He's stunted, so he's emotionally like a 12 year old.
- [05:26]
A
Okay, so how does him being stunted change his motivations, though? Because he says in this episode explicitly, part of his hope in designing hybrids is building something that he can have an intelligent conversation with. Does he really think that. That for something to be smarter than him, it'd have to be part robot?
- [05:41]
C
Yeah. You know, I think maybe the component of the hybrids that Boy K didn't fully think through was the human part, and that humanity is gonna challenge them because Wendy has a brother and wants to get back with him. That's like a human part. That's not the machine part. Arthur, he's tracking her and he's like, oh, she's communicating with the brother. And then that's how she learns how to control the system. And they're like, holy shit, she's more powerful than we even thought. Well, that power is driven by her emotion, which, again, no one saw that coming. I don't think they thought, like, her emotion would mathematically collide with her AI powers and teach itself how to run the system, because that's how emotionally she's going to get into Jo's life. So there's going to be this kind of collision of humanity and machine and what wins. And, you know, we'll see more of that later.
- [06:32]
A
There's a lot going on here already in these first couple of episodes. There's an article from the 90s by a postmodern feminist theorist named Donna Haraway called the Cyborg Manifesto, where she talks about cyborgs and being post gender and sort of post family and having technology embedded with you. And I feel like there's a lot more of trying to figure what a cyborg is, what an artificial person is with this, and how those fit into notions of family. I wonder if that's something that you were thinking about too, how to learn to be a post human cyborg entity in a post human world.
- [07:00]
C
We explore this as the season goes on, especially with Wendy, let's say, as the protagonist of this all. Like, which side is she gonna lean into, human or machine? What's gonna win out? So that's evolving. She's doing a bit of the party line at the beginning where she's. Like when Boy K took her from the family and told her father that he would save her life, but she'll never be able to contact them again. She's kind of holding that party line until emotionally she gives in. So the crash through the ship is the catalyst of their relationship getting back. She just reconnected with her brother, just convinced him that she is Marcy. And now he's ripped away from her, from the xenomorph. You know, she has to save him. And again, without giving away too much, you start seeing the choices that Wendy has to make.
- [07:48]
A
Dame is hinting there that the hybrids are always kind of in between the other character types on Alien Earth. There's a difference, though, between a robot implanted with human consciousness and a robot that thinks it has a human consciousness. I'm not even sure Dame Sylvia knows for sure which it is here, and she helped build them. So let's go to S.E. davis, who plays Dame and can give a sense of what's going on in the mind of one of Neverland's adults in the room.
- [08:13]
B
I was just so excited to have an Alien script land on my doorstep because I was a massive fan of Alien. My husband, Justin Kurzel, who is a fantastic film director, when he and I first got together when we were in our 20s, and he said, you have to watch this. Haven't you ever seen Alien? Oh, my God. So he introduced me to Alien and Aliens. And then when I met Noah and he said, yeah, we really want to base it mostly on that first and second on Alien and Aliens. That's the world we're going to be in. I'm going. I am totally in. My character doesn't get to go on the spaceship. But our first walk through the spaceship was like being a little kid and, you know, all of us walking through Going the lights link on, switches work, things like, wow. I mean, it's just like, gives me goosebumps thinking about it now. Just walking into those sets is pretty extraordinary.
- [09:10]
A
Okay, so you're seeing these incredible spaceships. You're on set in Thailand. There's, like, people from all over the world working on the set with you. What was that like? What was the vibe on set like? And did it change the way you approached the job?
- [09:21]
B
I just really loved working with the Thai crew as well as the international crew. We had. We had people from all over the world as we had actors from all over the world working together. It was a really international, fun, eclectic group of people. And it was huge. And, you know, we got together as a cast and we'd go and read in someone's room and read all of the episodes. Often not play our own characters, play somebody else's character so that we could just be free of having to do anything performance wise. And in a way that was nice because we didn't have the pressure of being watched by a bunch of producers.
- [09:58]
A
Like, do you use those to work through options? Or does that become like, here's how I'm gonna do it?
- [10:02]
B
Sometimes if we were playing our own characters, then sometimes. But quite often everyone would go, okay, I'll be Wendy. Or one of us was, you know, narrating all the print. And so, yeah, we just had fun. And sometimes people's interpretations were so stupid, you would. It would never, ever, ever, ever be done in that way whatsoever. Actually, up until the morning of my first day shooting, I was doing a different accent.
- [10:31]
A
Really.
- [10:32]
B
I had this kind of, I would say, hybrid French international school accent, as if I'd say, studied pretty much around the world, which is really beautiful and probably very accurate, but I guess a little risky as well. In the end, I bravely became the Australian.
- [10:52]
A
Even early on, you know, it's clear that Dame Sylvia is really central to the story. You must have realized that when you were reading scripts. How did you think about creating that character?
- [11:01]
B
Well, she's quite a complicated character because she's not only an incredible, incredibly successful scientist, she's a woman who had to do a hell of a lot to get into that position and maintain that position. Her aim is to make humankind immortal, but it has to be humankind. Not just a machine that looks like a human. She has a very delicate struggle with helping nurture a human morality in a world where morality is very questionable. And she's also handling a boss who has given her this opportunity, and yet he's also highly volatile because he's essentially been a child genius and has had very little good parenting.
- [11:53]
A
He's. It's right there in his name, right? He's fetishizing remaining a child.
- [11:58]
B
Yeah, but I don't. Boy Kay. He wants to stay a child, but he never really was a child. He never had a childhood. So he's deluded anyway. You know, he thinks he's Peter Pan. She has been like a mother to him. They've been engaged in this relationship for at least the last decade. So she's managed this genius as a child who has never really had a childhood.
- [12:26]
A
So she's managing a lot of different kinds of relationships. She's managing relationships with the hybrids. She's managing this relationship with Boy K. She's managing her actual relationship because she works with her husband.
- [12:38]
B
There's a lot of different dynamics, relationship management. And it's quiet. It eats into her time.
- [12:44]
A
Right. It's hard to actually do science when you got all that going on.
- [12:48]
B
There is a lot of that going on. But it is so important to her that her creations remain human. I love Adarsh and Jonathan's characters. They're just constantly in child mode. They're still way down in the. I'm a boy. I want to play.
- [13:04]
A
Like, Boy K's never been like that, right? Like, he.
- [13:06]
B
He's never been like that. He's never stopped to play. Children have this infinite imagination. Yes, they do. But he's never spent any time in the. In the wonder of that infinite imagination. Whereas all of these kids have, in their own way, they're essentially children that need the time that a normal human would take to grow into adolescence and to become adult. I guess that's where the real difficulty lies, is who are the moral guides in this world? Because Kirsch doesn't give a about humanity and neither does Boy Kay, really. So Arthur and Dame Sylvia, we're in a very powerful position, but we've got to hold on to the reins of this horse really tight in order for that human element to be protected. She's basically going, I have made humankind immortal. But also, it's gotta be very delicate. Otherwise we're just gonna have a bunch of fucking brats, excuse my swearing, running the world forever and doing really naughty things.
- [14:19]
A
He mentioned the weird position that Dame Sylvia and that Arthur, her husband, are in. Their relationship is also another dynamic in. Among all of these things that, you know, you wonder how aligned they are. Do they agree with what they're doing, do you think, with each other?
- [14:34]
B
I mean, I think that in the privacy of their own home, they probably have a lot of, how are we going to handle Boy K conversations? What are we going to do? How are we going to tackle this? Initially, they're very aligned, but actually in their dynamic, Dame is the boss. She's way higher up the food and is privy to much more classified information than Arthur is, which is pretty tricky. You know, they love each other. They love each other deeply, but their work has been completely all consuming of their lives and relationships. And Dame Sylvia's got. She's got to reach the absolute top of her game and there's no time to stop and have children if that where she's got to get to. And as much as he would love them, here we have them. We have them.
- [15:27]
A
Look, Alien movies always have weird, kinky, maternal stuff going on. That's one of the. Especially the Sigourney Weaver cycle has a lot of that happening. But you're the scientist here too. You actually did create them. It's not just found family stuff. So where on the. I made up this spectrum between mom and Dr. Frankenstein, where do you put Dame Sylvia?
- [15:48]
B
I think she's on a sliding shifter between those poles.
- [15:52]
A
Right.
- [15:53]
B
I think that she genuinely has a great love of these children, but she has chosen them to experiment on. I think she does see them as her amazing creation. But as much as she loves Marcy, she loves her in her Wendy body.
- [16:13]
A
Okay. As he's digging into some complicated human emotions there. And as a completely human type person myself, I'm obviously familiar with them. But look, you're gonna hate me if I say I'm kind of here for the xenomorphic alien with acid for blood. You know, the reason Colonial Marines nuke sites from orbit. An organism whose perfection is matched only by its hostility. You know, I'm here for. I'm saying Cameron Brown, who plays the xenomorph.
- [16:40]
D
I got sent a self tape briefing with a list of movements and requirements that they wanted to see for a nondescript creature. For An Untitled show. It was about 14 different specific movements they wanted to see, including crawling and walking and jumping and lunging and attacking and things like how the creature would start in a smaller shape and expand outward and then from an expanded shape, contract again.
- [17:06]
A
We want you to extend a teeth lined tongue outward. If you can just manage that for us. Had you done that kind of movement work in addition to stunt work, I would make a distinction between those things, but maybe I'm wrong. And those are actually all part of the Same talent and skill set.
- [17:23]
D
Everything performance wise, is connected in some way. So in stunts, you get bleed through into acting when you have a character that's slightly more featured or you might be given dialogue. And creature performance is another one that bleeds over. While auditioning for this show, I was working on the Planet of the Apes movie, the latest one, as a stunt performer on that. As part of that, we were required to play chimpanzees and gorillas. So a lot of the creature movement from that bled over into not just the fight scenes and the action, but performance capture of those creatures.
- [17:56]
A
So describe the costume. What are you actually wearing?
- [17:59]
D
The costume itself was designed by a team of technicians at WETA Workshop. It's made predominantly of foam latex with silicone additions through it as well. And then it's got fiberglass, which holds the shell of the headpiece together. But it's kind of like a giant, thick wetsuit.
- [18:19]
A
Famously, the headpiece is the heavy. Is this heavy part. Is it like a helmet that you're putting on, or is it above your head and you're inside it? Are you in it like a mask?
- [18:26]
D
Yeah. If you can imagine the shape of the creature, my head lives within the neck and then the head sits on top of my head and it's about a meter long. And our hero, full animatronic version of that head weighed close to 8 kilos, so it's still got a fair bit of weight to it.
- [18:43]
A
Wow. Right, yeah. But parts of the suit are animatronic. So are you controlling that from inside the suit or. It was built by the VFX company, weta. Are they controlling it?
- [18:53]
D
That's a part of the WETA team who's puppeting it externally, using remote controls to power all the servo motors and animatronics and make the lips snarl and the teeth move and the tongue come out and all of that.
- [19:05]
A
That means there has to be a lot of collective teamwork. Right. So that while you're doing the large body movements, somebody else is doing the facial expressions, essentially. So that has to be timed. You have to be working with them. They've got to be watching to make that complete.
- [19:17]
D
The real spirit of the creature performance is collaboration. So so much of it is the team who was working with me, and by team, I mean the wearer technicians who were surrounding me, puppeteering the tail, puppeteering the teeth, and looking at the overall image of what is their art. Right. Like the suit is their piece of art that they've designed and how that can be presented Best on camera to show that this creature is scary.
- [19:41]
A
How long did it take to get into the suit?
- [19:43]
D
It wasn't too long, to be honest. And by the end of it, we had it down to a pretty fine art. I think at the start of the show, we were allowing about 40 minutes to get fully kitted up. And then by the end of it, we could have that halved. So about 20 minutes to get everything on.
- [19:58]
A
That's not bad at all. But if you're wearing it outside in the heat in Thailand, I suppose that would make it more of a chore. Walking around craft services waiting for your. Waiting for this scene.
- [20:08]
D
Oh, man, I was so well looked after. They always had aircon tents, and if not tents, then these big pipes that they pumped through the jungle to pump aircon over and things like that.
- [20:18]
A
That's cool. I mean, literally cool. So once you're in costume, you're on set, what kind of direction are you given on how to move through the space?
- [20:27]
D
I remember one of the notes that Noah gave quite early on was, despite the size of the creature, because in the suit with everything on, the creature stands at about 8ft tall. So you can imagine standing next to that and it looming over you. It's already quite a presence. One of the notes he gave was he wanted me to play against the size of the creature. So despite it being very large, it should still have this grace and kind of fluidity to its movements. And something I took from that was the different ways the creature moves in different states. So in a state where it's not actively attacking and it's kind of stalking through the ship, it's more slow and everything's more like graceful and fluid. But then it has that sudden, like, explosive kick. As soon as it's go time and ready to attack, it changes from this sort of drifting movement to very direct and straight on and on target.
- [21:23]
A
It is interesting because you worked on Planet of the Apes, so there's a living creature to draw from there for those movements. But it's not like you can go to a zoo and look at a xenomorph and see what they're really like. So were the films source material for you?
- [21:35]
D
I watched the first one and the second one over and over. And then the third one, I took a lot from Alien versus Predator as well. There's a lot of really cool movements in that movie. I think it would have been silly for me not to try and incorporate what was already a very, you know, solid and well established character portrayed by these incredible Performers and try and pay homage to them and continue their legacy. Like you said, there is no zoo or anything where you can go see this creature, but there is a ridiculously large fan base. And so there's so much fan art and concept art and everything out there showing the xenomorphin different poses that fans think are cool in ways that they want to see it. So I looked at a lot of those as well and tried to take those freeze frames and then see how I could incorporate those through the movements as well.
- [22:19]
A
There's a scene that I've been asking a lot about in episode two, the Louis XIV costume dress, dinner. Can you talk about what it was like to film that and what your movement through that scene was? My understanding is that it involved getting, like, really swung down like that. It was a real plunge into the room, onto the table. So I wonder what that was like.
- [22:39]
D
For you when we first walked onto that set and saw the other artists in costume, because all of the corpses in that scene were all artists who were fully dressed up. They weren't dolls or anything like that. So they all went through makeup and then had all of the gore and stuff added to them. And the art department, having designed that space as well, walking in straight away, it was very contrasting to everything else we'd seen on the show so far. The action piece that you're speaking about, which is the xenomorph leaping off the balcony and attacking one of the characters, was possibly one of the biggest standalone stunts I've done in my career so far, and also one of the most enjoyable. Everything on the show we tried to do as practically as possible. And I think this stunt in particular shows the whole culmination of this. We had all the departments working together. The camera movement was on a dolly, not on tracks, just a free dolly. Alex, the actor in the shot as well, down below, I was positioned in the costume, up the top on the balcony. Then we had special effects with detonated glass for a chandelier, a balustrade, and then a table down the bottom. And, of course, the stunt team directing all of the action and having me positioned on wires, ready to leap off this thing. And then all of that preparation we do comes down to maybe two seconds of flight time in the air, where everything has to go off at once. The debts go bang, bang, bang, and I leap. Alex looks up, sees me for a split second, then gets out of the way. The camera moves at exactly the right time and captures everything. And I don't think many people get the opportunity in Their career to do something like that. And that felt really special to be a part of.
- [24:19]
A
That's super cool. So how many takes did you get? Is it just the one take?
- [24:24]
D
Two takes. We did two takes of it, of the whole thing.
- [24:26]
A
So you did. So they reset all of that stuff that gets detonated. Do it again.
- [24:30]
D
That's right.
- [24:30]
A
To come through. Wow.
- [24:31]
D
All of the rubberized glass that they fired out, they had to sweep off the floors. All of the breakaway stuff had to be reset. The chandelier reset, the camera reset all of that. We did a few block throughs before without all of the debts, obviously, but as far as cameras rolling, yeah, I believe it was two takes.
- [24:49]
A
So from Cameron Brown wreaking alien havoc in the xenomorph sequences to some more kind of weighty flashbacks of Hermit's life with his family, Episode two runs a real gamut. But I want to lean into the pathos here a little bit more. When Wendy finds Hermit, her brother, she explains that their father approved putting Marcy's mind into the new Wendy body. But are those memories enough to make a hybrid human? And do they make the hybrid the same human? If you knew you pretty much couldn't die, what would keep you human? Those are all very easy questions for writer and co executive producer Migzy Pensado.
- [25:22]
E
Kirsch lays out to Wendy, you used to be food, really, to him, to this synthetic being. That's what humans really were. They were just a part of the food chain. And it's really our consciousness, our sense of self that makes a human human. And for me, I would take it one step further, that it's not just our relationship to ourself or the awareness of us having a self, but instead it is a relationship to others and how we care for or how we feel about others. That connection to another person, another being, another creature, whatever, whether you go even deeper and get into, you know, quantum entanglement or any of that, we are connected on some level to other beings around us. And I think that the hybrids, even though their bodies are synthetic, their consciousness is constantly reaching out towards others. And I think that for me, that was enough for me to say, they're human.
- [26:19]
A
So perhaps they're human in some way, but after the transference, are they still the same human that they were before, or are they human in a new way? I don't know. Is that even a question worth asking?
- [26:29]
E
For me, I would say that the more important question comes down to autonomy, and it's how do they see themselves? Whenever you're dealing with artificial intelligence or any of that in science fiction. It's like we know for a fact that these were human children that came from human bodies and are now transplanted into this synthetic body. And it's like, well, that's one step past AI. Or is it really? Are we just taking the sum of the parts of the brain and putting it into this thing? Does that make it not human? Now, these are fun questions and I don't think we have a solid answer. I don't have a solid answer for myself.
- [26:58]
A
From a storytelling perspective, they exist in tension with all the other categories of character. They're not quite human, they're not quite monsters, they're not synthetics, they're not cyborgs, they're not adults, they're not corporate. They're all the things that everybody else isn't. And that means that the dynamic is always one of opposition with anybody they're talking to.
- [27:19]
E
Yeah, not just opposition. I feel like relationship, just regardless. Because it's like. To whom do you identify is as interesting a question as how you see yourself, like in the search for a sense of self within others. And I think that, you know, we've socialized, we form groups, we form relationships with people and animals and all of that with the sense of self. We reach out to recognize ourselves through other people. And I think that is fundamentally what makes up a good drama. But B, the search for this humanity is made up of that question. And I think that each one of these characters goes through that constantly. And it's really a question of then where do you stay, which side do you stick with? And that question of like, am I a human, Am I a monster? Am I a creature? Am I something else? Again, there are no answers. But the question is always in flux for each of the characters.
- [28:11]
A
The hybrids have a built in capacity for like human adjacent feelings. They have approximations of hormones and emotions. All that stuff's kind of designed into their software and hardware, but obviously they can be manually adjusted or turned off entirely. What does that do to their humanity?
- [28:24]
E
Yeah, it still exists in this way. They've quelled some of that, as they say to Wendy in the first episode. They've turned down some of the simulations of serotonin, all of that kind of thing, but the ego is still there and the consciousness is still there. And I think that they're in a battle with like. Well, it's as Dame Silvia said, we can't keep messing with these kind of things because we're exploiting human potential. We're trying to like make humans. You know, this is the idea. And I think if you were to look through Dame Silvia's eyes and look at the sales pitch of it, I think the important thing to her is that you still get to be yourself. If you go into this synthetic body, we're not making you into a machine. You still get to be you. Just, you know, immortal and indestructible. And it's an important thing for Dame Sylvia. It is absolutely unimportant for Kirsch. I think if Kirsch had his druthers, he would absolutely turn off everything that's human about the hybrids. I think he would want to see what their potential is unencumbered by the feelings. But still, being human, Dame Sylvia, is.
- [29:20]
A
You can transcend death, but retain your humanity. Kirsch has no. He's like, I didn't have that humanity in the first place.
- [29:26]
E
So it's absolutely unimportant to him for sure.
- [29:28]
A
Right.
- [29:29]
E
But I think that it's important to him in the same way that it's important to Boy K. And Kirsch is tied with Boy K's wants and needs in that way, and I think that he recognizes it. But it's. I think, you know, for whatever autonomy Kirsch may have, I think he would just rather work with more synths, maybe not.
- [29:48]
A
So you've got all these different types of beings, different levels of humanity, different kinds of simulated humanity. What are the conversations like with the actors about how to play it? So the differences come across.
- [29:57]
E
One of my favorite sort of anecdotes is watching two sort of masters in this craft. It wasn't a conversation I was a part of, but I got to sit back and watch of Noah and Tim Oliphant talking about. Kirsch doesn't have the capacity to display sort of anger or that kind of thing. It's not really a part of his coding, but he clearly has some motivation. So how do you display these kind of things? And it might not be in a way that's necessarily obvious or apparent to people, but are the occasional smiles that Tim gives to Boy Kate, and you're like, oh, there's something else behind that, which is really. I mean, the best actors do whatever's on their face isn't necessarily the feeling that's being emoted behind that. So if you can convey that underlying feeling while doing something completely different with your body and face, I think that's a really interesting challenge.
- [30:54]
A
I imagine there's a little something behind every character's facial expression when they're talking to Boy K. He's not exactly someone you stay neutral on, especially the way Samuel comes at the part.
- [31:02]
E
There is one bit of trivia that you won't ever see that I will give you because it is a thing that I am sad to have lost. Obviously, in the sake of time, it needed to be cut, but the scene between Dame Sylvia and Boyd Cavalier where he is chomping away on the proverbial apple of knowledge, the end of that scene originally had him just throwing that apple on the floor, which I absolutely loved. And that now is no longer a part of the scene. But you know, it's a nice little bit of IMDb trivia if anybody ever listens to this. So there you go.
- [31:34]
A
That's another episode of Alien Earth, the official podcast sealed into hypersleep. Next week, Boy Cavalier gets some alien shaped toys to play with. And this is what it sounds like when facehuggers cry. That's your teaser for episode three of FX's Alien Earth. If you get a chance, you can rate, review and follow Alien Earth, the official podcast, wherever you get us from. I'm Adam Rogers. I'll see you here next week.