Sandra Yi Sencindiver has joined the cast of FX’s Alien series, while some new details on its plot and setting have also emerged.
Ending a drought of about seven years, this August’s Alien: Romulus will be the first movie in the series since 2017’s Alien: Covenant. Beyond that, there’s FX’s TV series on the way, which is said to be due to air (or stream) in 2025.
As filming on the series continues in Thailand, a new member has been added to the cast: Sandra Yi Sencindiver, perhaps best known for her work on another sci-fi series, Foundation.
First reported by Deadline, the casting announcement also comes with some plot and setting details that, at least to our tiny minds, sound rather new. The outlet states that the series will “take place on Earth and has been reported to deal with the emergence of the story’s infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation and the race between corporations to create new android life.”
Sencindiver is said to be playing a character high up in the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and that there’s “scope for the character to grow in future series.”
There’s clearly a long-term plan for FX’s currently untitled Alien series, then, which is being headed up by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley.
We’ve known for a while that Hawley’s show will take place before the events of Alien and that it would be set on Earth, but the stuff about it being about the rise of Weyland-Yutani and the creation of androids is news to us. Interestingly, the making of artificial life – as seen through the eyes of antihero David (Michael Fassbender) was exactly what Ridley Scott’s own prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were about.
Hawley has previously implied his films would either ignore Scott’s prequels, or at the very least lean more on the retro-future aesthetic of 1979’s Alien than the ‘Apple store’ look of Prometheus, to borrow his phrase. To then learn that the series will explore similar themes to Scott’s prequel films is therefore quite surprising.
Nor do we know exactly how the xenomorph will figure in the whole thing, given that it’s set on Earth years before the crew of the Nostromo touched down on LV-426. Maybe there won’t be any aliens in it at all? That’d certainly be a bold move, albeit an unlikely one.
More on this and other Alien-related matters as we get it.
Read more: Alien | What does Noah Hawley’s upcoming TV series mean for Prometheus and Alien: Covenant?
