‘Alien: Earth’: Sydney Chandler on becoming Wendy, the warrior

Ripley. Predator. Space marines and ancient gods. Across nine films and now one TV show, the titular monster of the Alien franchise has met and mutilated many adversaries. None, how-ever, quite like its latest foe. This summer, you see, brings the release of Alien: Earth — or, as it might have been called, Alien Versus Yoga Instructor. “I’m that weird person who brings a mat to set, doing sun salutations on a spaceship,” laughs Sydney Chandler, star of the year’s most anticipated science-fiction series and, it turns out, a fully licensed vinyasa master. In her spare time, the 29-year-old leads classes at a small yoga studio, having earned her teaching qualifications “a couple of years ago”, just for fun. 

Between takes on Alien: Earth, the Texan actress would sneak in solo sessions wherever she could, among the wreckage of a crashed space cruiser and down claustrophobic corridors, sprayed in the blood of Xenomorph prey. “I had to!” she beams, explaining that this was in part for the novelty — it’s not every day you get to child-pose in a fully realised recreation of a dystopian future, after all. But it also helped deal with any waves of anxiety. Because entering the Alien universe, though a huge moment in her career and the realisation of a child-hood dream (“I grew up with the original,” Chandler says of the 1979 classic that started this all) — well, it’s terrifying. Less terrifying than being lunged at by a face-hugger, perhaps. But only marginally.

“If I let myself think about it too much, it’s a really scary ocean you’re stepping into,” Chandler says of the scrutiny attached to this franchise, a scrutiny that can sometimes bubble up into online fury, as proved by the reaction to 2012’s philosophical prequel Prometheus, directed by Alien’s original architect, Ridley Scott.

There’s experience elsewhere in her family of carrying major TV shows — her father, Kyle Chandler, famously led US drama Early Edition and American football series Friday Night Lights through the 90s and 2000s, before graduating to the big screen with parts in The Wolf of Wall Street and Super 8. Chandler Jr, however, finds herself tackling one of pop culture’s biggest IPs with only a handful of eye-catching supporting turns to her name: a role in Florence Pugh thriller Don’t Worry Darling here, a lively portrayal of the rock star Chrissie Hynde in Danny Boyle’s Pistol there. 

“I’ve just tried to focus on my job, bringing my character to life. Now it’s in the audience’s hands, and they can [receive] it how they’d like to. I hope they love it. But if I start trying to think of whether people are going to enjoy it or not, it causes stress,” the actress explains. But there may be no need to fret. For starters, the show — about a trillionaire tech bro’s human-robot-crossover playthings, who become embroiled in the aftermath of a failed research mission to the farthest reaches of the galaxy — is created by Noah Hawley, best known for turning the Coen Brothers classic Fargo into a stunning five-season TV drama. 

“When I saw there was a Fargo TV show coming out years ago,” Chandler admits, “I [initially] wouldn’t watch it. I thought: ‘There’s no way you can recreate the film. There’s no way you should recreate it!’ And then of course, when I finally sat down and watched it, I was locked in.” That show “completely honoured the essence of the film while making an entirely new world” and ever since, she’s been an ardent admirer of Hawley, who, in some ways, pulls off the same trick twice with Alien: Earth, suggests the actress.

“It honours that feeling of Alien visually and metaphorically, but it’s also completely unique. I’m a massive sci-fi fan and I hadn’t seen a film or read a series of scripts like this. I hadn’t seen sci-fi done this way. In fact, you know… I hadn’t seen a character done like this.” 

Which brings us to her character Wendy, who is, according to Chandler, “gung-ho, brave, go-with-your-gut”. Alien is a franchise famed for strong female characters who are forced into battle with space’s deadliest killing machine. From Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley to Cailee Spaeny’s Rain in last year’s Alien: Romulus, it’s as much a part of Alien’s DNA as chestbursters and untrustworthy androids.

In Alien: Earth, however, Chandler doesn’t play a paragon of feminine maturity and resilience like Ripley and those who followed. Wendy is a terminally ill child whose consciousness is downloaded and transferred into a powerful synthetic body by Samuel Blenkin’s mysterious Boy Kavalier. The result is a tween-like personality in a super-powered body — a fascinating duality that demanded a complex performance from the actress.

“Wendy really spoke to me,” she explains. “Her storyline is not a romantic story or a sexual story. It’s a story about family — a story about her and her brother [CJ, played by Andor’s Alex Lawther — see page 23]. She’s a kid trying to figure out who she is in a world that tries to batter you into all of these different identities.” Working out how to portray a child in an adult body was “a huge question mark” in the beginning. “I did tons of research. I talked to all of my young nieces and nephews. I even took a kids’ karate class at the yoga place that I teach at,” she laughs. “Then I finally sat down after having [written] pages and pages [of notes and ideas] and tried to boil it down to two or three words.” The phrases she landed on were: honesty, bravery and complete presence. “And that’s where I found my Wendy.”

There wasn’t much in Chandler’s own childhood to pull from for the character. Growing up near Austin, Texas, she was (and still is) “someone who can overthink. I pull myself back to fit the tone of the room.” Back then, there were no aspirations to follow her father in acting — instead, she had dreams of being a vet. It wasn’t till she took a creative writing class that involved an acting component that she realised there was magic and meditation in disappearing into a role. 

Of course, that task is easier when you’re working with practical sets and costumes, rather than acting in front of a green screen and “interacting with a tennis ball”, says Chandler. On Alien: Earth, tens of millions have clearly been lavished on sets so big “you can get lost in them,” she explains. And don’t get her started on the xenomorph itself — an abomination of nature crafted not from CGI pixels, but from cutting-edge costuming.

“The first time I saw the suit, I definitely almost peed. People actually took steps away from me,” she laughs. “It’s like a real alien! It can drool. It can breathe. It can run insanely fast. I re-member, especially on night shoots, being chased by it or fighting it. I was legitimately scared. There were so many times where they’d call ‘Cut!’ and I’d just start laughing at how scared I was.” Going toe-to-toe with the beast was like “meeting one of your heroes”. If your hero is a nightmarish vision whose blood is sulphuric acid and whose only motivation is inflicting pain… 

Right now is the calm before the storm. The day of our interview is a sunny morning in June. By August, when Alien: Earth hits screens, Chandler will likely find herself at the centre of frenzied online debate, and not just about what may happen next in the series and how events in the show fit into wider Alien lore (in case you’re wondering, the series is set two years before the events of the original Alien). Like Hawley’s Fargo show before it, this series promises to have things to say about our world today that feel destined to provoke conversation.

“There’s a lot about the environment. There’s a feeling of nature trying to kind of crawl back in and kind of take charge again,” says Chandler. “And the power of greed too. I think greed is something that’s a throughline in all of the Alien films — the way that humanity can fall into its grasp.” Such is the genius of Noah Hawley, she enthuses. “He’s able to communicate questions in his stories. He doesn’t give you answers. He’ll just give you questions. And that’s something that I feel is a rarity now in television and something I really wanted to be a part of. A lot of people will watch the show and enjoy it for the horror and the fun and the sci-fi of it all. I hope that other people leave it with more cerebral ideas about AI and consciousness and what it means to be human and where our world is going,” Chandler adds.

So far, there’s no word on series two. “We’re not picked up yet. I’m really hoping we are. Because, not to give anything away, but with my character, we’re really vacillating between the natural and the synthetic. What it is to have a human heart versus blocking off emotions,” says Chandler. “That’s something that I am hopeful to explore more with Wendy — where her humanity ends up sitting. There are some great ideas that Noah has kind of whispered my way as far as where we might go. So I’m excited and I’m hopeful,” she says with a smile. 

First, though, there’s the small task of impressing audiences with this series. There are questions to answer: meeting the high expectations of Alien’s passionate, sometimes fractious fanbase? Doing it on the small screen — and with an actress still largely unknown? It sounds like a stretch. Luckily, stretching is what Sydney Chandler — actor, alien fighter, yoga instructor — is clearly all about. 

Taken from the August/September issue of Rolling Stone UK, out now. Subscribe to the magazine here.