The 24-year-old actor — who plays one of the show’s two adult Xenomorphs — had to film a fight scene with the CGI-generated creature, but he wasn’t left completely in the dark. The Alien: Earth prosthetics crew had sculpted a realistic prop version of t. ocellus, which served as a stand-in during scenes that required actors to react to its presence. “Everything that you see as CGI is actually built practically first,” lead prosthetics designer Steve Painter explains.
Still, Brown was shocked when he saw t. ocellus in action.
“After the show came out, seeing how Noah created it on screen and how agile it is, I really didn’t expect that at all,” Brown tells Polygon.
But to truly bring the creatures of Alien: Earth to life, the show’s art department had to lean heavily on the same retro-futuristic visual design and practical effects employed by the original 1979 film. Set two years before the Nostromo incident, Alien: Earth had to look right. The show’s prosthetics team, Wētā Workshop’s art department, and creature suit performers like Brown all worked together to make sure the series measured up to visionary Alien concept artist H.R Giger’s legacy.
Conception
“In terms of what we were nervous about, it was everything,” supervising art director Vaughan Flanagan says of the creature design process. “But in particular, getting the Xenomorph right.”
Flanagan and fellow Wētā Workshop art director Joe Dunckley worked together to ensure the show’s various extraterrestrial species looked like they belonged in the Alien universe. This was no small task — in addition to multiple Xenomorphs, the show introduces a menagerie of new non-Xeno species, including t. ocellus. Flanagan says the design process for the new aliens was where the Wētā Workshop duo had the most freedom — and the most fun.
“You just don’t have the ghost of Giger over your shoulder,” he tells Polygon.
Dunckley and Flanagan definitely felt the presence of H.R. Giger’s ghost when it came to the show’s Xenomorphs, however. Alien: Earth gave audiences their first up-close look at the Xenomorph life cycle: The fourth episode depicts what is possibly the first chestburster birth that doesn’t come at the cost of a human life. After medic Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther) loses a lung due to an injury, scientists at Weyland-Yutani competitor Prodigy allow a tadpole-like creature removed from a facehugger to incubate in the lung.
“We nicknamed it the lung-buster,” lead prosthetics designer and supervisor Steve Painter says, chuckling.
But surprisingly, once the creature has busted its way out of Joe’s lung, we learn his synthetic-bodied sister, Wendy (Sydney Chandler) can speak to the creature, charming it like a snake by using her synthetic voice to replicate Xenomorph speech. Wendy continues to bond with the alien as it matures, and it eventually grows up into a well-trained personal killing machine that comes when called and follows orders.
“It is very much different,” Flanagan says of the semi-tame Xenomorph. “It’s grown in this unnatural way. It’s [gestated] inside Hermit’s lung, but it’s sort of been messed with. Its life cycle has been altered.”
To represent the surprisingly low-trauma manner in which Wendy’s Xenomorph was born, Dunckley and Flanagan made some slight changes to its appearance. Instead of the standard sleek, black color palette, Wendy’s Xenomorph sports a pale, mottled pattern on the top of its domed head, and the creature has a much smaller stature than other members of its species.
“There is sepia in there, and we did that intentionally in the dome itself so that the dome is transparent, and underneath — as part of the sculpt of the underskull — there is a skeletal form in there,” Dunckley explains. “We brought in some of the original Giger [color] palette into that area, leaning into some sepias. Just a little nod [to Giger’s designs] there.”
But getting Alien: Earth’s creature design right on paper was only part of the challenge. Once concept art was approved, the next major hurdle was building suits, animatronics, and other props that would look believable on-screen. While the smaller creatures the USCSS Maginot brought to Earth (like t. ocellus) were computer-generated, Hawley wanted practical effects to do the heavy lifting when it came to the show’s Xenomorphs, just like they had in Ridley Scott’s original film.
Creation
“KY Jelly still makes its appearance now and again, trust me,” Painter says, grinning.
The set of the original Alien film was packed with enormous, oil drum-sized containers of the lubricant, which was mainly used as the slimy drool that drips from a Xenomorph’s mouth when it’s salivating over its next kill. Ridley Scott used everything from sheep intestines and lube to cow’s milk and bits of seafood to create the slimy Xenomorph eggs, pale white robot blood, and facehugger guts that make Alien feel so real. Thankfully, modern materials like methylcellulose meant the cast and crew of Alien: Earth didn’t have to deal with biohazards on set. Things weren’t any less slippery, though.
“There’s a little room of technicians who add more components that can make it stretchy or runnier,” Painter says of the crew responsible for Xenomorph drool. “They’re always covered in goo, these guys, and god bless them.”
But despite being filmed on a much cleaner (and far less smelly) set than the original film, Alien: Earth had no shortage of gross-out practical effects. According to Painter, the scene in which Prodigy scientist Arthur (David Rysdahl) dies via chestburster was, hands-down, the most difficult — and disgusting — sequence to pull off.
“Noah told me to watch the John Hurt classic chestburster sequence from the first film and basically said, ‘That’s what I want,'” Painter says.
Painter and the prosthetics team just had to flawlessly recreate an iconic practical effects sequence from a beloved film. No pressure, right?
“People think that gore is very easy, and to a degree it is, but I see it as an art form,” Painter says.
Unlike the infamous moment in which John Hurt’s character, Kane, spews blood on his fellow crewmates, arms twitching as the chestburster punches through his torso, Alien: Earth’s big chestburster scene takes place outdoors, in broad daylight, on a beach in Thailand. There was no dining table to hide the chestburster in — Arthur is lying flat on his back in the sand as he dies — and no darkness to conceal any imperfections in the prosthetic build.
“We’re in the 21st century now, so we have new materials and new techniques, but I wanted to keep it retro looking because I wanted that homage to John Hurt,” Painter says. “In the original sequence, you just see John Hurt from mid-torso upwards. [With Arthur], I wanted to see the whole body. So we had twitching legs with David and you get the whole deal. It’s basically the same effect, but we just expanded it and took it bigger using modern materials.”
Further complicating matters was the fact that the scene was filmed in two different places. The close-up shots were filmed in Bangkok, just outside one of the show’s soundstages. The full-body footage was captured on a beach in Krabi, and had to match the Bangkok footage flawlessly.
“It was so technical,” says Painter. “It’s such an iconic scene that everyone knows it’s going to be [in the show] somewhere, so there was a lot of pressure on me to deliver what we delivered. I hope that the fans got a bit of a ‘Woohoo!’ when it happened. For me, personally, that’s why I do this sort of thing. I want the fans to be entertained and the payoff to come.”
Execution
Viewers didn’t have to wait long for things to get gory. The show’s pilot episode opens with the crew of the Maginot being mercilessly slaughtered by an adult Xenomorph, played by Cameron Brown. Brown — who says his favorite entry in the franchise is the original film — tells Polygon that his main goal was to live up to the legacy of Bolaji Badejo, who was the first to don a Xenomorph suit back in 1979.
“The weight of playing that character was very present from the start and I wanted to do it justice for a creature that’s so iconic in science fiction,” he says. “I really wanted to make sure that I added to the legacy that was already there.”
Brown spent two weeks inside the Xenomorph suit, and described the shoot as “a fever dream.”
Thankfully, his suit was far more flexible — and easier to put on and take off — than the one Badejo had to wear. By the end of shooting, he was able to get into the suit in just 20 minutes. The suit is modular, with a removable tail and different types of legs (including several pairs of stilts) that could be quickly swapped out depending on what kind of shots the script called for. But an easy-to-wear suit certainly didn’t make the shoot into a cakewalk for Brown, because the majority of the show’s Xenomorph scenes were created with practical effects — including the Xenomorph’s deadly showdown with Wendy in episode 3.
“I would say 90% of the action in the show we did practically,” Brown estimates. “It was only things that I guess they missed that they fixed up with CGI. So that whole sequence in the location on the side of the crashed Maginot, we spent a week there and shot all of that fight sequence practically.”
The scene features extensive hand-to-hand combat and ends with Wendy decapitating the Xenomorph, but just like his face off with t. ocellus, Brown couldn’t see much of what was going on, making it the most challenging scene he filmed for the show.
“Some of the movements were just tricky in the suit,” Brown says. “Like having a hook wedged through the mouth and attached to the head of the Xenomorph, which is then attached to my head. So all of the movement of that hook translates through my neck and into my body, and then [I’m] trying to figure out how to keep the movement true while navigating that. That sequence was tricky, but it was a really fun sequence to shoot.”
At 6’2, Brown was the perfect height to play the Maginot Xenomorph, but too big to play Wendy’s Xenomorph, so stuntwoman Jayde Rutene stepped in to fill that role. But despite his love for Alien and his determination to honor its legacy, Brown says his favorite creature on the show was t. ocellus, which Noah Hawley nicknamed “Eye Midge.” While it’s not clear why Hawley picked that name, we do know the creature’s eerie intelligence was inspired by an abandoned plot twist Ridley Scott decided not to feature in Alien.
“There’s so much that you can explore with that creature, and it’s pretty terrifying,” Brown says when asked which creature he’s the most fond of. The Eye Midge is my favorite for sure.”
Xenos may be the stars of the show when it comes to the Alien universe, but like Brown, Dunckley, Vaughan, and Painter all agreed that the scene-stealing t. ocellus was their favorite of the new creatures Alien: Earth introduced. And after working with H.R. Giger’s former assistant, Marco Witzig, on art for Alien: Earth, art director Joe Dunckley is confident that Giger himself would have approved of the cute-but-deadly little creature’s design.
“I actually have it on authority from Marco that Giger would have loved the Eye Midge,” Dunckley says with a smile. “That’s high praise.”
