It’s been half a year since Disney announced Noah Hawley’s (Fargo, Legion) upcoming Alien series for FX on Hulu. It’s still early — and Hawley has been working on a bunch of other projects, including an upcoming novel called called Anthem — but speaking to Vanity Fair, he provided some insight into what the project will look like once it ultimately debuts.
In the interview, Hawley provided a bit of a production update, saying that Alien is his next project, and that he’s written “the first two scripts,” which will go into production next spring. He noted that there’s quite a bit of special effects work going into the project, and that the entire industry is “trying to jam two years of production into one year.”
Story-wise, Hawley noted that the series won’t feature Ripley. “She’s one of the great characters of all time,” he said, “and I think [that] story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it.”
He also noted that he’s diverging from the films a bit — where Alien is famously a haunted house in space, he noted that this series will be set on Earth, with the idea behind it being “what happens if you can’t contain it” — and noted that “it’s also a story about inequality.”
“You will see what happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved. If we as a society can’t figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what’s going to happen to us? There’s that great Sigourney Weaver line to Paul Reiser where she says, “I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.”
In addition to talking about Alien, Hawley previewed his upcoming novel, saying that it “came from my struggle about how to raise my own children,” and that
“I’ve wrestled with this question of what are the skills that a child has to learn to navigate a world in which people can’t even agree about what reality is? It focuses on young adults who go on this quest through America, and there are witches and wizards and trolls and all the stuff that you find in fantasy novels. “
The novel is due out in January 2022, and it looks as though Hawley will kick off production on the series shortly thereafter.
