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“I am a big Alien fan, a very big sci-fi fan, so there was an internal pressure to do fans justice, that I had to take off myself,” says Sydney Chandler, who is starring in the epic – and brilliant – new Disney behemoth Alien:Earth, “It’s a terrifying thing to step into, so much bigger than anything I could imagine. We had about 650 people on set every day.”
Stepping into the mighty Ripley’s shoes as the new lead character for the Alien franchise is a daunting task, but when the production is prestige TV with a $250 million budget, things get real. Yet the show is a triumph, mixing splattercore horror with contemporary angst over AI. Set just before Ridley Scott’s original, all time classic Alien, it wisely sticks close to the original, yet also expands the universe, with the classic Xenomorph and some terrifying new aliens, being ‘captured’ and fought over by big tech corporations on earth, including Prodigy, which run by young genius Boy Kavalier. And Chandler completely owns the screen as Wendy, a Hybrid with a terminally ill child’s mind transitioned into a synthetic adult body created by Prodigy. It is a performance by turns vulnerable, fearsome and eerie.
“I’m the type of person who, if I’m anxious about flying say, I’ll research the hell out of it, but you can’t research a Hybrid. With a blank page comes a lot of stress, but also a lot of freedom.” She says the key to it was showrunner Noah Hawley allowing her to lean into the character, “and have a conversation with my inner child. Find the freedom of a kid. Not overthinking, not being too self-conscious, kind of ‘let’s go’. She is more of herself and capable of holding her own, in a way I can’t always do. She helped me through this production, really.”
The 29 year old came to acting quite late. The daughter of actor Kyle Chandler, she was raised near Austin, Texas, and didn’t move into acting until 2019, although she quickly found attention with a pivotal role as Chrissie Hynde in Pistol, Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols series.
Growing up, she says she was a “solo kid” into reading and writing sci-fi and fantasy, and suffers from anxiety. Taking on the role in this franchise was therefore hard for her, but her way through it was to focus: “I've never taken on something this big. I put a lot of pressure on myself to deliver. Some of them joked that I became a machine, but to an extent I did.”
Yet for all the stress, she is finding a home in acting.
“I've always been a kind of a solo kid, I was never on a team. Jumping into acting feels like I get to be a part of a team, and I’m learning to allow my fear to dissipate. It's been really life changing to learn the power of community.
I was very much in my imagination as a kid. I remember all of my imaginary friends, and all of the games we would play together which were always like Lord of the Rings-esque. I’ve lived a lot of my life in my head. So finding this, this career path, has been so wonderful because it mixes everything
You’re not the oddball at the lunch table by yourself you're like surrounded by all the oddballs. We made it. Our day job is getting chased by aliens.”
Ah yes, being chased by aliens. So was it actually scary being chased by a Xenomorph?
“Oh yeah, I really did get scared, which was cool. . I had a lot of night terrors as a kid and I would see the form of the Xeno and Gollum, those were the two shadows that would be creepy, nebulous organisms in my room. And when you’re filming at night, sprinting for five hours in the heat of Thailand [where it was shot]... in that kinetic energy, when the Xeno is chasing you, it’s terrifying.”
However, the guy behind all the blood-on-the-walls mayhem? Not so scary.
“Our wonderful, xenomorph monster actor Cameron Brown is this lovely human from New Zealand – and he's a vegan. You’d have this 8ft tall Xenomorph running after you, really fast, and then he’d pop the head off and eat some celery.”
One of the things that she liked about these sequences was how physical they were. As with much of the production – echoing the first film with a retro-futurism – the realism gives a real sense of threat on screen, and was fun to act.
“There's a point where I'm tugging on the xenomorph, pulling back and forth trying to save my brother and, and I was really pulling him. Cameron was giving me a little bit of room to pull and then taking it back so we were really playing tug of war with each other, and being able to use your whole body, your whole strength and really be working against a living breathing body. That was awesome, because you can't fake that. That is such a physical feeling.”
This restraint in the use of CGI (though it has to be said that the more digitised monsters here are brilliantly done, horribly scoring high on the Ick scale) appealed to Chandler, who is someone who likes to write letters, “the weird friend who makes everyone else into pen pals.” The intensity she conjures manages to channel Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, whilst also developing her character in complex ways.
“I am a huge fan of the original and I did watch it back quite a bit. The thing about Ripley is she’s so grounded, nothing is pushed, it’s so subtle and stark and efficient. And in the first 30 minutes of that movie you don’t know who the protagonist is. There’s a really brutal honesty to her acting, and I tried to be as honest and open as I could on set every day.”
Wendy’s relationship with her older brother - well, he used to be her older brother pre-transition - CJ (played by Alex Lawther from End of the F***ing World), is pivotal to the whole series, with him trying to make sense of the sister he assumed to be dead, now appearing in the body of this ass-kicking robot. Says Chandler, “The moment when we first connect, I saw the fear in his eyes and that propelled my response in a completely different way. To see your big brother afraid of you. Wendy’s stronger, it changes the dynamic of their relationship, he could no longer protect her, but she could protect him.”
She enjoyed the fight training, particularly the day when, as a bonding exercise, the cast were divided into groups for a big game of War. “There were no rules and we were in this strange wonderful warehouse in Thailand and we just went crazy. It was to get us into that childlike space.”
She says this was crucial to her and the other Hybrids, who are regarded as the forever young Lost Boys by the Peter Pan-obsessed Kavalier. To act like kids inside adult bodies required some knocking down of, “the wall that adults put up to protect us. Kids aren’t battered by the world yet. They’re honest. If they want to get up and leave a room, that’s what they do. So in a lot of these games you’d try to embarrass yourself as much as you can in front of your cast mates as soon as possible. So then you could just go on set and play.”
Again though, as a Sci-fi fan, it wasn’t simply about the action aspects but the intellectual opportunities the show presented.
She says, “Sci-fi is such a great vehicle to study humanity, that's why I just love it so much. You get to create a world that is entirely built on whatever metaphor you want it to be. I think because I played Wendy, the biggest question I thought about was immortality, which I have decided I would not want in the slightest. Not having the inevitability of death takes away the preciousness of life, it would lose a lot of colour.”
Talking to Chandler, you have the sense of someone who is on a unique journey, this oddball Sci-fi fan with her imaginary friends, who is discovering a valuable new world in the acting community while also coming to understand aspects of herself. She says, “I feel like a lot of, a lot of the roles that I've gotten, if not all of them, have been characters who are a bit isolated from the rest of the group. A bit odd or different, and they have a vast internal landscape that might not be portrayed via their words per se. All of those characters go on a journey of finding truth or finding something missing inside.”
She says she most identifies with characters when, “there's a bug inside them, and I don't know where it is and I can't scratch the itch. There's something that they're really seeking and I don't know what it is. Wendy very much felt like that. She taught me a lot. That sounds like probably kooky, but she goes through a massive journey and knows how to hold her own and stand on her own two feet and not have to give anything else beyond that. Just her and her own space is OK. That's something I've pocketed.”
As with Wendy though, you worry a little for Chandler in this new world: not Hollywood, but Fame. It’s one thing being on set working, quite another to suddenly become public property. Already she’s had a few sneering ‘nepo baby’ headlines, and was criticised in a piece by Variety for pulling out of a cover shoot – she said she was ill - and not wanting to appear in one of their social media talent quiz games. Hawley didn’t exactly defend her to the magazine, which was rather Kavalier of him. Chandler is finding her place but being in this kind of huge show adds a different level of scrutiny, one which an anxiety-sufferer clearly would require support for.
Still, while she says there have been “moments of existential crisis and spiraling” in the course of her new Alien adventure, like Wendy she is trying to take it moment to moment and deal with it.
“The industry is a massive wheel and there's no handbook or rule book. If you have anxiety or aren't used to big crowds, it's daunting. But even in that, once you step into it and you're OK, it's life altering. So I've been learning a lot.”
Alien: Earth is on Disney Plus now
