“For kids, four hours, four days, 40 years feels the same,” Chandler told UPI.
1 of 3 | Sydney Chandler plays Wendy on the FX series “Alien: Earth.” File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
Sugar and Pistol actress Sydney Chandler says her Alien: Earth heroine Wendy doesn’t understand the immortality an adult synthetic body affords her because her consciousness is only 12 years old.
“For kids, four hours, four days, 40 years feels the same. It feels like a lifetime,” Chandler, 29, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
“So, the idea of telling a 12-year-old, ‘You’re going to live forever,’ I don’t know how much that would sink in,” she said. “Even knowing your family is mortal, it would feel like you’re still going to be around for a million years before you’re 30.”
The eight-episode thriller was created by Noah Hawley and takes place two years before the events of the classic 1979 sci-fi movie Alien, in a universe where corporations are more powerful than countries.
Much of the story takes place at Prodigy’s futuristic Neverland Research Island facility on Earth, where a group of super-strong, fast humanoid robots imbued with human consciousness were created by the tech genius Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin).
“I had bad eyesight as a kid and then when I got my eyes fixed, it changed everything for me,” Chandler said about how she connected to Wendy.
“It was eye-opening. I’ve got all the puns today,” she laughed. “But I gave that to [Wendy] and, so, when she wakes up in this new body, everything is led by her eyes. The term ‘wide-eyed,’ I kind of put into physical form.”
Chandler said she was thankful that Hawley encouraged her to get inside the head and heart of the person she was playing.
“Not focus on a child. Not focus on the synthetic body. Who is the personality and how does the personality leak out of the machine?” she said she was instructed to ask herself.
When a spaceship from rival company Weyland-Yutani crashes into a nearby city, the hybrids are tasked with finding and neutralizing the terrifying monsters onboard.
The mission reunites Wendy with Hermit, the brother who was told she had died of a terminal disease, when in reality she had her mind and memories transplanted into a synthetic body.
Imitation Game and Black Mirror alum Alex Lawther, 30, plays Hermit.
“He’s a medic. When we first meet him, he thinks he’s lost his sister and pretty soon he has to sort of revisit that assumption,” Lawther said.
“He’s vulnerable and he is finite in the way that all of us are,” he added. “He could die, which is something that renders him at a loss in terms of his relationship with his sibling, who is now Invulnerable and immortal. Even to say it sounds sort of unfathomable. It ends up being a real divider between the siblings.”
Lawther compared the role reversal of an invincible younger sister looking after her older brother to a child watching a parent grow old and fragile.
“There was a fear and a frustration and a confusion that you brought out in your acting that caused frustration for me as Wendy,” Chandler said.
“I really felt that because, again, from my point of view, going into those scenes, I was like: ‘He’s going to know who I am! How would you not know? You’re crazy.’ Everyone’s crazy except for her.”
Lawther said Hermit does not envy his sister’s powerful new status, knowing that she will long outlive him.
“Hermit’s almost kind of repulsed by — not by you, love –” Lawther assured Chandler, “but by the idea of something synthetic because he is so obsessed with sort of humanness. … I think it makes him feel a bit uneasy.”
The show’s ensemble includes Timothy Olyphant, Babou Ceesay, Essie Davis and David Rysdahl. New episodes air Tuesdays on FX and Hulu.
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