Last week we learned that Fargo and Oppenheimer actor David Rysdahl had joined the cast of FX and Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien series as a regular cast member. Details of what character he is playing are still unknown though.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Rysdahl talked a little about the Alien series, as well as Noah Hawley’s approach to bringing Alien to the small screen.
Well, Noah Hawley clearly likes being in the David Rysdahl business, as he also cast you in his upcoming Alien series. Was this in the works, pre-strike?
Yeah, I went over to Thailand for one day of camera tests, and then things shut down. Noah told me after we wrapped on Fargo. He said, “There might be a role for you on Alien,” and I grew up on both Alien and Fargo. So if you had told me two years ago that I was going to be in either universe, I would’ve thought you were crazy, and the idea that I get to play on both playgrounds makes me feel pretty lucky and grateful. And Noah, in a similar fashion to Fargo, takes the movie and asks, “What’s the DNA of this? What’s the world perspective? What themes are we tackling? What was the original intent of this movie? Let me see if I can play with that in a new way.” So he’s doing a really interesting job of that on Alien, and it’s going to be a very different but very exciting view of what the original movie was.
David Rysdahl as Wayne Lyon in Fargo.
You can check out the entire interview in which Rysdahl also discusses his work on Fargo and Oppenheimer over at The Hollywood Reporter. Thanks to Gimitko for the heads up!
Noah Hawley also recently discussed the challenges he faced in adapting Alien for series storytelling, as well as the designing the shows aesthetic, suggesting that the upcoming series might be returning to the lo-fi sci-fi of the original Alien.
The challenge for me is: Is there a way that we can take the audience back to “wait, what’s happening? What does this thing do?” That was the first challenge. The second challenge, which is why I think it justifies a show with multiple hours of storytelling, is that it’s not just a monster movie. It’s about humanity trapped between this primordial “they want to eat us” past and the AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us. We’ve created these tools that are turning on us, or if we program them correctly, we’ll go insane. Those elements of humanity, artificial intelligence, trans-humanism — ‘what’s the future of humanity?’ is a really interesting thing to talk about right now. Combined with the revenge of nature — we’re experiencing that now as weather or viruses or whatever. If we’re in a place where our self-driving cars are gonna kill us, or we’re going to drown in them, there’s a story to be placed in the middle of that.”
Keep your browsers locked on Alien vs. Predator Galaxy for the latest Alien Series news! You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to get the latest on your social media walls. You can also join in with fellow Alien and Predator fans on our forums!
Some people prefer to be negative than positive.
Alvarez's film is obviously following the more traditional route but this guy is taking it in a completely new direction.