Picture, if you will, a monster so powerful and so unpredictable that everyone around him lives in a constant state of fear. Oh, I should mention: This monster is a young man. He’s also a genius and a trillionaire CEO. His employees have to say yes to every command, no matter how ridiculous, and smile as they do. His name is Boy Kavalier and he’s the subject of today’s program. This is Alien: Earth.
[Removes poorly made Rod Serling mask.]
Samuel Blenkin tells Polygon that when he first auditioned for the role of Boy Kavalier, he struggled to understand the character. On the one hand, Kavalier feels like an obvious metaphor for the bratty tech billionaires dominating our lives in the real world. But he’s also a peculiar character whose motivations can be hard to pin down. It wasn’t until Alien: Earth’s showrunner Noah Hawley offered a helpful comparison from The Twilight Zone that the role clicked into place. “I got a pretty intense reference from Noah when I first met him,” Blenkin tells Polygon.
That reference was “It’s a Good Life,” a 1961 episode from season 3 of Serling’s original Twilight Zone series. “It’s a Good Life,” based on a Jerome Bixby story, imagines a town where a monster in the form of a young boy uses his psychic powers to control everyone in a small town named Peaksville. If anyone annoys him, or frowns, or even thinks an unpleasant thought, he transforms them into a “grotesque walking horror” or banishes them to a cornfield.
To be clear, Boy Kavalier isn’t banishing anyone to a cornfield (at least, not yet) but there’s an obvious link between the two characters that soon clicked into place for Blenkin.
“That reference struck me as very strange,” Blenkin says. “But then as I started to read the scripts, I understood what he meant. It was a kind of note for me, not about a performative style, but about what it feels like to be in the room with a character like that.”
Throughout Alien: Earth, everyone around Kavalier smiles and nods as he makes increasingly erratic decisions, sacrificing his cutting-edge human-robot Hybrids so he can experiment on dangerous alien specimens. It’s all clearly headed somewhere awful. But before the show reaches its chaotic finale, we checked in with Blenkin to get to the core of Alien: Earth’s most unpredictable character.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Alien: Earth episode 6.]
“Be bold or go home”
Alien: Earth episode 6 opens in a boardroom where Kavalier meets with Yutani (of Weyland-Yutani fame) to negotiate the return of the alien specimens he looted from her crashed spaceship. Negotiations get off to a rough start, however, when Kavalier shows up late and promptly puts his bare, dirty feet up on the table.
This simple action, which sets the tone for the entire scene, wasn’t in the original script.
Ugla Hauksdóttir, who directed episode 6, recalls a conversation with Hawley where he suggested the idea, along with a few other key details that help define Kavalier’s character: “Noah said to me, ‘He’s somebody who may be super late. He’s not somebody who minds having people wait for him. I think he might even put his dirty feet up on the table.’”
Blenkin had a similar idea.
“I read the script, and the first thought I had was that this guy doesn’t wear shoes,” the actor says. “He sees himself as Peter Pan.”
As the negotiation continues, Kavalier’s behavior goes from rude to downright weird as he climbs onto the table and begins to crawl toward Yutani. This wasn’t in the original script either: Blenkin improvised it during rehearsal.
Hauksdóttir says that when it first happened, she was shocked, but she ultimately decided to follow the actor’s instincts: “Sam begins crawling on the table. My instant reaction was that I really loved it, but it’s a bold decision to make as a director when the time is ticking. I thought, If I say yes to this, either we’re gonna make the greatest scene ever, or I’m gonna get fired. But yeah, be bold or go home.”
For the audience, it’s a fun moment in an otherwise pretty tense scene. For Blenkin, his character’s bizarre behavior is yet another example of Kavalier’s unique psychology. He’s a funhouse-mirror reflection of our real-world tech elite, living in a reality where nobody can ever stand up to him. The result is a manchild whose biggest passion is messing with his enemies.
“He hates Waylend-Yutani,” Blenkin says. “He sees himself as a disruptor; new, exciting, fast-moving, so different from them. He just rocks up and goes, Right. How can I be rudest?”
“He is definitely not a good CEO”
Kavalier’s most confounding decision in Alien: Earth is also the one that sets the entire show in motion. When a Weyland-Yutani spaceship full of murderous aliens crash-lands in his city, he decides to send his Hybrids (billion-dollar, immortal experiments) into the wreckage to see what they can find. Everyone around him thinks it’s a bad idea, but they’re too afraid to push back.
Six episodes later, it’s still unclear exactly why Kavalier made that decision, even though we now know he engineered the crash that brought the aliens into his back yard. But for Blenkin, the answer comes down to one simple truth: Kavalier has too much money for his own good.
“There’s a sort of existential boredom at the heart of this character,” he says. “The Hybrids, he invented them, they were cool for a while, but the problem is that he gets bored. When you’re a trillionaire, when you have that much power, your world starts to lose meaning.”
Does this make Kavalier a bad businessman? According to Blenkin, the answer is a resounding yes: “He is definitely not a good CEO. He might be a genius, but he is not able to multitask and manage things at the same time. That’s not the way that his brain works.”
This may also help explain why Kavalier was so willing to sacrifice the Hybrids in the first place. He’s entranced by a shiny new thing: the aliens.
“He just wants something interesting to happen,” Blenkin says, and that can lead to some very reckless decisions.”
Ultimately, Kavalier’s unpredictably annoying behavior comes back to that Twilight Zone episode, which Blenkin used as his guiding light while shooting Alien: Earth. After all, as long as he understands how everyone else is meant to react to his character, the rest of it all falls into place.
“I’m obviously aware of the parallels of what’s going on in the world right now and what’s happening with our technology and with people who have prominent positions of power,” Blenkin says. “But Noah saved me from having to think about that too much, because he gave me this mad character reference.”