Noah Hawley Discusses Return to Horror Roots in Alien: Earth

FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth has been burning bright on the sci-fi prequel horizon for years, and the final stretch before its August 2025 debut is just beginning. A new trailer and complete synopsis for the coming series on Hulu and FX reveal a horror show both meditative and jump-scare-ready, with stunning new moments of dread and a closer look at its main character, Wendy.

Stretching minutes long and mixing moody, almost quiet scenes with vignettes of familiar sci-fi terror, the latest trailer opens with a zoomed-out, slow-moving shot of an unidentified alien spaceship adrift in the vacuum of space. A few jump-cuts later, the spaceship has landed, bodies litter the floor of a dimly lit ship, and the human race is hunkered down and panicked as alien creatures slither around them in the dark. In the background of the new trailer’s third shot, a xenomorph itself can be seen lurking in the shadows of an alleyway.

The latest teaser follows months of showrunner Noah Hawley’s declarations that Alien: Earth would be closer in tone and mythos to the original Ridley Scott-directed Alien (1979) than its predecessors and peers like Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant. Hawley’s Alien: Earth, with eight episodes, will find a near-future Earth’s most powerful corporations all gunning for humanity’s biggest edge and resource: life, and maybe, immortality.

The Bigger the Corporation, the Better, Right?

In Alien: Earth’s universe, the year 2120 on Earth is not a government-run society but one run by five mega-corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. This is the Corporate Era, a near-future where humans have all but melded with the technology they use. Cyborgs made up of human and artificial parts walk among synthetics, humanoid robots powered by advanced AI operating systems.

Prodigy Corporation, run by a mysterious young Founder and CEO, is making headlines around the world for a new leap forward in the hunt for the holy grail of forever. For the first time, humanoid robots will be powered by the human consciousness itself. Artificial intelligence and robotics have been ongoing themes for the Alien franchise in general and Alien: Covenant in particular, but Hawley and his team promise something new: a humanoid robot powered by the mind and body of a child.

Meet Wendy

Meet the first of these new humanoid robots, played by Sydney Chandler. Wendy is the main protagonist and also “the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child.” A prototype of this new tech, Wendy, is at the center of everything that happens next. Her calm is broken by the incursion of a crashed Weyland-Yutani spaceship near Prodigy City, which Wendy and other hybrid robots encounter. They touch and are infected by unknown, dangerous alien organisms. Creatures more deadly and less known than ever before.

New to Chandler in the role of Wendy are Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, a synthetic mentor and trainer for Wendy; Alex Lawther as CJ, a soldier; Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, an eccentric and calculating CEO of a major corporation; Essie Davis as Dame Silvia; Adarsh Gourav as Slightly; Kit Young as Tootles; David Rysdahl as Arthur; Babou Ceesay as Morrow; Jonathan Ajayi as Smee; Erana James as Curly; Lily Newmark as Nibs; Diem Camille as Siberian; and Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins.

The Alien: Earth Countdown Begins

FX and Hulu have slowly ratcheted up excitement for Alien: Earth since both services announced they were in development in late 2022. In January, they threw a teaser short film into the mix in the unlikely place of the NFL’s AFC Championship game. The teaser lasted just over a minute and was shot from the first-person perspective of a xenomorph. Racing down the corridor of a spaceship, the creature ran along steel grating and hurdled into a cargo room, only for the entire vessel to start shaking and plummet towards Earth at rocket speeds. The audience has no context for the scene, but horror fans are forever curious.

The first trailer that premiered last month was more immediately revealing. Opening with Wendy being built in 2120 on the Neverland Research Island, the footage shows her as a fresh prototype working out of a mega-corporation research facility. After an alien spacecraft crashes in the nearby ocean, Wendy’s human consciousness and biological “adult body” are imbued in the android as an experiment of transference for others of the “Wendy” model. One day, Wendy suggests to herself to check out the crashed ship and bring its unknown cargo back to her facility. But inside the burned, blackened spaceship, there’s not a gift of science, but death. The bodies of five alien life forms, five dead and deadlier creatures unknown to humanity, are now brought back to the lab.

It’s a setup with which the true horror of human hubris is all too familiar. As the trailer’s penultimate scene, which features Hawley on set, drives home, this final trailer is less about big action and more about ratcheting up the tension and dread of things to come.

Alien: Earth arrives August 12 on FX and Hulu.