‘Alien: Earth’ Star Alex Lawther Reveals How He Found Out Nemik’s Manifesto Would Return in the ‘Andor’ Season 2 Finale: “That Was Not in My Contract”

FX‘s new gritty sci-fi thriller Alien: Earth is full of Xenomorphs, cyborgs, synthetics, hybrids, trillionaires, and high tech, but there’s one very human character anchoring the show’s deepest drama.

Hermit (Alex Lawther) is just your average medic working for the security branch of mega-corporation Prodigy when he’s thrust into an incredibly dangerous rescue mission. He and his team are dispatched to do damage control when a rival corporation’s research vessel crash lands on Prodigy territory. However, Hermit has more to worry about than saving civilians. The crashed ship was carrying five alien creatures, all of which pose an existential threat to humanity.

Making Hermit’s day all the weirder is that he finds himself rescued in Alien: Earth Episode 2 “Mr. October” by a super strong synthetic woman named Wendy (Sydney Chandler). The twist? Wendy claims she is actually Hermit’s dead younger sister Marcy (Florence Bensberg). Marcy was the first human to have her consciousness transferred into a synthetic body, making her the first hybrid. Hermit accepts this news only after Wendy successfully remembers two peculiar events from their childhood.

DECIDER caught up with British actor Alex Lawther over Zoom recently to go deeper into Hermit’s story and the actor’s own relationship with the Alien series. We delved into Hermit’s odd relationship with “sister” Wendy as well as how Lawther and co-star Sydney Chandler bonded on the show’s Thailand set. (Oh, and we learned exactly how Lawther learned his Andor Season 1 performance was being used as a profound coda in the Star Wars show’s finale…)

DECIDER: I was reading some press that you’ve already done and I noticed that we have something in common. My mom showed me the Alien movies when I was growing up and apparently your mom did too. So I’m curious about your story with Alien. How old were you, what did you think of it, and why did this project call to you now?

ALEX LAWTHER: My mum did show me the film, I think. I mean, it’s kind of murky. Any of my memories of teenage-hood, like most people’s, are sort of like a witch’s cauldron of things remembered. But I think my mum did. I definitely oddly remember associating Sigourney Weaver with my mom in some way. They’re both sort of androgynous and could definitely captain a ship. Maybe somewhere along the lines, I’ve had conversations with her about the Alien film, but it was particularly that first one which stuck in my mind. I know Prometheus, I’d seen in the cinema. But in my living memory, it was definitely Alien (1979), Sigourney, and Ridley Scott that sort of had most embedded itself in my imagination.

And then my introduction to this project was sort of top secret. The studios, I mean, they name their scripts under aliases when actors audition for them so you don’t really know what you’re auditioning for, but your agent or whatever sort of tells you anyway. So it’s this weird thing that happens where it’s secret, but you’re aware of what it is. They’re like, “It’s called Mr. October, but we think it’s probably Alien. Here are the sides.” And it was for the character that I play called Hermit. I sent in a self-tape and I was surprised when I got called back. Yeah. I don’t often audition for like military-based care workers. So that was interesting. And then I met [series creator] Noah [Hawley] and though, “Oh, okay, this is probably quite serious. He is actually quite interested in me taking part.” We had a conversation over a cup of tea in London, just as he was on his way to Thailand. And then I got a call saying, “Come to Thailand in like two weeks.” So it all moved quite quickly.

I’m really struck by the moment in Episode 2 when your character discovers that his sister is in the body of Wendy. The questions that your character asks her and the answers I thought were really interesting, particularly the story of her first day at school and how she came home bruised and beaten in and said, “I am mad to them.” That’s apparently, I guess, what your character thinks of when he thinks of his sister. What is the moment where he’s like, “Yes, this is my sister. I believe in this“?

I think it’s an ongoing question for him, [chuckling], from Episodes 1 to 8. He profoundly wants to believe, but it’s very unsettling to believe it. And there’s many obstacles along the way for that belief to be made concrete because she doesn’t look like his sister, she’s able to do things— Specifically, she’s not requiring of the same thing from him that his sister was before, which I think is really uncanny. I think that’s the trickiest thing for Hermit. Almost more so than her looking different and being in this sort of bionic body, but the fact that she no longer requires him in the same way. So that means that he, as a brother, as a sibling, has to find a new shape himself. And he keeps getting it wrong and gets it wrong throughout the course of the season. So I thought that was quite interesting.

I thought it was quite an interesting, quiet problem for me to be solving throughout the episodes. Whilst there’s obviously much more brutal questions and much more, much scarier predators lurking in the corridors, Hermit is trying to figure out something quite small and familial, but for him, massive.

Speaking of which, I was really struck during the junket how close and sweet you and Sydney seem to be off camera. What was it like working with her and, you know, building this strange familial bond?

Yeah, it was really easy. It was really easy working with Sydney. I’m trying to find the perfect way of describing it because it’s like she’s a much, much more experienced actor than she is. You know, she’s quite early career, and yet her technical skill is really staggering. I was in awe of her. I was impressed by her. And she was captaining the show throughout the eight episodes, and yet this is her first time leading anything, I believe? That in itself is a technical skill, a managerial skill as an actor that sometimes you have to learn to do, but normally it comes a bit later in your career. So I just found her endlessly impressive and also very easy to feel sibling-y towards.

You know, I think me and her both have a sort of similar overactive brain and needs off-set sometimes for quiet. The wonderful thing about Thailand is on your days off, people go and have a massage or they go to the onsen. There’s this amazing onsen in Bangkok where we spent a lot of downtime. We had a similar need for quiet, basically, and but a shared sensibility on set as well, I think. Just really wanting to do a good job. So, yeah, the components needed to sort of feel somewhat related to Sydney, that was the easy part of the job.

I have one question that’s not about this show. I wanted to ask you about Andor because I love that show. I’m curious if you’ve become aware that Nemik is almost like a resistance meme online. How do you feel about that? And did you know that your voice would be heard in the finale at any point?

Well, I didn’t know that and that was not in my contract. [laughs] No, no, no. I got an email from gorgeous Tony Gilroy about it. I found that so moving because you become attached to these characters that you play in a probably overly sentimental way. You sort of don’t think of them as like extensions of yourself, but like friends that you sort of knew. And to know — that sounds so, so whimsical, but like — that friend somehow had resonance in a way that you hadn’t expected, I find that really, really thrilling. And I also loved… There’s some characters that you feel particularly close to you because you love the experience of playing them, and being part of Andor was such a delight. I think that writing is so good, but also the actors I got to work with, in Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Diego Luna and Faye Marsay. Yeah, it was a pleasure for many reasons.

One thing was, and I’ve said this before, is that I didn’t know what was in his manifesto the whole time we were shooting, because he hadn’t written that bit yet. It was only post shooting, and I kept on bugging him and being like, “Tony, I’d love to know what’s in Nemik’s manifesto because he’s banging on about it all the time, and it would kind of influence maybe how I play him.” You know, is he a Marxist? Where does he fit on the political spectrum? I assume he’s swinging pretty far to the left. But he’s all, “You know, don’t worry about it. I haven’t written that. It’s fine. It’s just, you know, something maybe a bit Marxist, whatever.” And then in the ADR, he presented me with a couple of paragraphs which were Nemik’s manifesto and we just did it a couple of times in the booth. He was like, “Great. Okay, cool.”

It’s funny that the bit that you sort of spend the least time worrying over and you just do quickly off the cuff becomes the bit that pops up again in the second season. I sort of love that. Yeah. I just love Tony’s writing.

This interview has been formatted and edited for clarity.