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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.
