Alex Lawther is in his sci-fi era.

“By chance,” the British actor laughs. “You don’t chase the genre — you chase good writing.”

Lawther is discussing his stint in the Diego Luna-led Star Wars spinoff Andor, season two of which aired earlier this year to rave reviews. “What I’ve loved about Andor is its ambitions to be intellectually serious in what it’s doing,” the 30-year-old explains to The Hollywood Reporter.

Now, he sinks his teeth into a fan-favorite franchise equally as “juggernaut-y” and cerebrally challenging with FX’s Alien prequel series Alien: Earth. Set two years before the events of Ridley Scott‘s 1979 film, the show tells the story of a space vessel that crash-lands on a version of Earth not-too-far in the future from now and sets loose the collected samples of several different alien life forms. A human-synthetic hybrid, Wendy (Sydney Chandler), and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers race to contain the crisis. Lawther — perhaps best known for his roles in Black Mirror and The End of the F***ing World — is Hermit, brother of Marcy, the conscious being inside Wendy’s artificial body.

The series, also starring Timothy Olyphant, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young and David Rysdahl, joins a catalog of Xenomorph showdowns, with Alien: Romulus released just last year. But Noah Hawley‘s endeavor — the first TV show to tackle Alien — is something of its own kind entirely.

“He walks that really fine line between loyalty to the source material that is well-loved and already well-consumed, but also being led by his own curiosity into whatever that might be,” says Lawther about Hawley, who is also the mastermind behind FX’s Fargo and the FX-Marvel series Legion. “So there was homework, watching the original films. … But also, once we were there on the floor in Thailand, we were very much within Noah Hawley’s world, rather than anyone else’s.”

Below, Lawther talks about finally unleashing Alien: Earth, premiering on FX in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally on Tuesday, Aug. 12. He describes Scott’s “godfather-ly” presence, needing “ramen and a hot bath” after a long day of shooting on the practical effect-heavy set and the Black Mirror-esque dread that pits the threats of an extraterrestrial past and technological future against each other: “We can sustain ourselves throughout the season on creature horror and the traditional Alien horror, but we have time to sit with moral horror, too.”

How did this part come into your life? Were you a big fan of the Alien franchise and Ridley Scott’s before that?

I got sent some scenes to audition with for a project called Mr. October, which was [Alien: Earth], but because the studios like to be so secretive, they don’t tell you what it is you’re auditioning for. [Laughs.] But agents sometimes know, so they send you the thing. They’re like, “We think it’s Alien. Send some self-tapes.” So I did that, and I auditioned again with the casting director, Kate Rhodes James, and then I met Noah [Hawley]. And it’s funny, I was just speaking to someone earlier about how it was like an ever-evolving thing in terms of Noah’s writing process. I think the scripts — or outlines of scripts — were there from before we went to Thailand to shoot, but it was kind of a movable feast. So it was quite interesting to see how the project itself was like a breathing animal, growing as we were making it. And then that mutation process continued into the edit.

Noah is very light and free with his editing. He’s really happy to take something that might have happened in episode seven and put at the beginning of episode two. Not to say that he did that specifically, but he understands the material we make on set is all just that: it’s material for him to then spend time sculpting into something else in the edit. I’d seen the first Alien film years ago and it lodged itself in me somewhere. But when I got the job, it was a pleasure to revisit that first release, with Sigourney Weaver.

Did you watch everything that came after? Do you feel fully immersed in the Alien lore?

I feel that what we were being asked to do was go with Noah into into this new territory. There was a faithfulness to [the franchise], particularly the texture of that first film. But Noah … the very first draft of the scripts was his curiosities, extended from Alien. They seemed to live in his imagination, so [it’s] very much his own. As with Fargo and with Legion, I think he walks that really fine line between loyalty to the source material that is well-loved and already well-consumed, but also being led by his own curiosity into whatever that might be. So there was homework, watching the original films. But also, once we were there on the floor in Thailand, we were very much within Noah Hawley’s world, rather than than anyone else’s.

A lot of people have suggested this is something you can watch without having seen any earlier Alien films.

Yeah, which makes sense, right? Because that would be kind of dull if you had to do homework before watching a piece of telly. I think it’s satisfying as well, not only the production design and the spacecrafts and the monsters, but there’s a tone that I think Noah was trying to re-create. He talks about wanting to recreate his own feeling when he first watched that first Ridley Scott film, and that, I think, was what led him to the strange Earth that we find ourselves in this season.

Talk to me about where Alien: Earth takes us and Hermit’s journey.

He is a medic. He works for a corporation called Prodigy, which is run by a very youthful trillionaire played by Sam Blenkin, under the name of Boy Kavalier. The world is, as we find it, split into five corporations. There’s no more government. It’s ruled by big corporations. And in the first episode, onto this planet Earth, through the crashing of a Weyland-Yutani spacecraft, arrives Xenomorphs. So in this recognizably future planet Earth, monsters are unleashed.

Simultaneously, Boy Kavalier and his company are designing and developing synthetic human bodies into which human consciousness can be placed. And the first prototype is a character called Wendy. Wendy is this grown-up body into which a girl’s consciousness, Marcy, has been put in. I happen to be the sibling of Marcy, but my character thinks that Marcy has died, and he’s about to discover that that might not necessarily be true. I suppose for him, that’s sort of the crisis of the whole season, really, is a reconnection with this [previously] thought lost sibling.

This is a show so deeply genre-ified. But there’s also material in there that feels pretty topical for our world today — this increasingly blurred line between artificial life and human life.

Yeah, I suppose, in a way, [that] is embedded in the original Alien films. When this extraterrestrial being confronts these very vulnerable human life forms, there’s immediate questions: What is the difference between that creature over there and myself here? And therefore, subtle questions [about] what it is to be a human being when you’re faced by something that is supposedly inhuman. That question is taken even further. There’s not only this primordial, extraterrestrial Xenomorph, [the] threatening past catching up with us, but this future, this synthetic AI [and] artificial human future is looming, is on the horizon. Does it pose a threat to us as human beings? Noah described it as threats coming from both sides — from an extraterrestrial past and a technological future. I suppose that question of what it is, therefore, to be a human being is something that Noah is obsessed [with], what the series seems obsessed with.

Also, what it is, therefore, to be a machine. That fine line between humanness and non-humanness. The character that I play is on the side of the humans, but he’s confronted by the possibility of something more than human, because suddenly it’s his sibling that is in this non-human body. The thing that he thought he knew as his flesh and blood, is also something more? Does that make her as much his sibling as ever, or less so? I think that’s quite a disturbing question for us.

There’s something Black Mirror-esque about it, too — a show you also starred in.

And the latest Black Mirror season is mostly trying to ask questions about AI. We’re obviously quite unsettled, but we don’t really have answers. I don’t think the show is offering anything in terms of response to it, but it is playing with our dread towards our own creations. Because, of course, AI is nothing but a mirror of ourselves. That feeling of dread is really only a response to our dread as to what humans are capable of. … There’s something quite playful in Alien: Earth in response to that dread.

Do we learn any more about the origins of Xenomorphs, or what they’re trying to do? In films, it often feels like everyone is killed before we can find out.

Yeah, because the films are an hour and a half, two hours maybe, but they’re still sort of theatrical length. I thought Romulus was really excellent and really scary. But there were moments where I thought, “Oh, I’d like to spend longer thinking about that,” or, “There’s a question that’s being raised there…”

There’s that creature at the end, half human and half extraterrestrial. I wanted to spend more time with that creature. And that creature doesn’t feature within our Alien: Earth, but those questions do. What happened? What happens when an alien makes us question our humanity? Also, what’s scarier? This supposed killing machine, the Xenomorph, or a trillionaire who has a pretty incurious relationship to morality. We can sustain ourselves throughout the season on creature horror and the traditional Alien horror, but we have time to sit with moral horror too. But there’s also a lot of care, and that’s at the center of this season as well — a relationship of care between a brother and a sister. So not all is lost. [Laughs.]

There is optimism that bleeds into this, then.

I think so. I think it’s rooted in it. It’s so scary because you have so much to lose, and if there wasn’t anything to lose, if there wasn’t anything worth being worried for, horror wouldn’t entertain us so much.

On practical effects versus CGI, where did Noah stand?

Most of it was practical. There were some things which couldn’t be done practically. The Xenomorph is a person inside a Xenomorph suit with its gruesome bulbous head and alien drool. That was both … [with] the actors around those creatures, there’s just a little less imagining to do. And then, therefore, you’re on the same page when you’re in a scene with something that’s actually there. That was the logic for the whole show, really, to use practical effects as much as possible.

Did you find yourself at any point genuinely fearful or does that go out of the window when there’s so many cameras around?

Your body doesn’t really know the difference. So you do end up fraught at the end of the day because your body does this weird thing of creating adrenaline when it needs to. You end the day with the remnants of that adrenaline still in your body. But it was just about learning to go home and buy some ramen and have a hot bath. Make sure you were getting to bed at a good time. [Laughs.] Yeah, it was quite practical caretaking that had to happen.

Ridley is an EP on Alien: Earth — did you ever run into him on set, hear about him giving any advice, or was it very hands-off?

I think he was quite godfather-ly on being contactable for Noah, if need be. But it’s also not Noah’s first rodeo. So I think he was quite happy for Noah to get stuck in. And once we were up and running in Thailand. … I mean, I have worked with Ridley before. We did a film called The Last Duel together. I had a small part in it, but I would love to know what it’s like as a filmmaker, off the back of your work, [to have] a franchise made. I wonder what that feeling is, how responsible you feel, how involved you want to be. I think Noah very much had Ridley’s blessing, and the rest was just about getting on and getting it done.

Does Noah have a vision for more seasons of this show?

I think he’s made it with the intention of making more…

You’re kind of in your sci-fi era right now with Andor and Alien.

By chance. I didn’t expect to be involved, however subtly, with the second season of Andor.

As an actor, you don’t chase the genre, you chase good writing. It just so happens to be that good writing has come my way, and I’ve auditioned for, successfully, in a short space of time, two franchise-y things. What I’ve loved about Andor is its ambitions to be intellectually serious in what it’s doing. Sci-fi can talk about what’s happening right now under the disguise of it looking like the future, or looking like a world that we don’t quite recognize. [It has] gadgets and spaceships and stuff, but actually it’s trying to talk about who we are as human beings today.

I’m sure you’ve had some pretty crazy fan bases to deal with.

It’s funny that, because we were in San Diego at Comic-Con and we premiered the first episode. There’s an enthusiasm, [but] I don’t find it crazy. It’s very well-organized. People are really polite. There’s a signing that goes on, and there’s a queue. People were saying, “Oh, yeah, you’re gonna have a crazy time at Comic-Con.” And actually, it was quite straightforward.

I totally get the compulsion to want to dress up as your favorite characters from a story. I mean, I essentially do that as a profession. So I totally get loving something so much that you want to be inside of the story that you’re telling. I think I felt like that since english lit classes at school. The teacher would be like, “Who wants to read out this passage?” And I would be like, probably annoyingly: “I really want to.” Because I wanted to be as close to the story as possible. I don’t know what that feeling is, but I think it’s something similar to being a Comic-Con enthusiast.

I do feel like something like Star Wars or Alien, as a franchise, can transcend those fan communities though. It’s so big it can attract people that aren’t even into TV.

It’s nice when something big and juggernaut-y, like Star Wars or Alien, is able to satisfy not just the pleasure of watching something that’s big but also the pleasure of something that’s actually engaging as well. I’ve been thinking a lot about sci-fi recently and what it’s trying to do, and I think a lot of people can take pleasure from a really good looking metaphor. Alien: Earth is shot beautifully, the production design is exquisite, and it’s good acting, it’s good writing. I’m not speaking about myself, but Sydney Chandler is [chef’s kiss gesture] excellent. It’s great when all of that stuff is engaging visually but also engaging cerebrally as well.

A lot of conversations I’ve been having seem to suggest high-end TV is doing something that films just aren’t tapping into right now.

Well, because it’s those studios that have money that are producing those TV shows, and then a lot of the good writers, quite rightly, are being attracted to the TV realm, because they can make a good salary. It makes sense because ultimately, that’s the most important thing: a good bit of writing. People will go and watch [good writing] whether they’re conscious of it or not. You go where the good writing is, whether you are actors or an audience member. So more power to the writers, I guess. We work inside a system, don’t we? And this one happens to be capitalism.

Have you watched Alien: Earth in full?

Yeah, in various versions. You get sent episodes. But I’ve not seen the final versions of all them, with the finished CGI components. So I guess I’ll be watching that live.

How are you feeling as the show finally makes its entrance? Excited, or is it nerves?

Because we made it now over a year ago, it’s mostly relief. It just sits for a while and goes off to an edit, and then you see it in bits and pieces, particularly something like this — the visual effects component is quite long, and so I’ve seen it in different stages. I’m just happy it’s finally to be released into the wild now.

Alien: Earth premieres in the U.S. on FX and FX on Hulu, and internationally on Disney+, Tuesday, Aug. 12.