[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Alien: Earth, Season 1 Episode 7, “Emergence.”]

Alien: Earth delivered one of its most gruesome moments of the season yet as David Rysdahl‘s doomed scientist, Arthur Sylvia, faced the Chestburster death solidified in the previous installment’s Facehugger attack.

In the episode “Emergence,” Arthur’s Facehugger-clad body is dragged around the island where Prodigy’s Neverland research facility is, as hybrids, Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi) attempt to find Morrow (Babou Ceesay) and the infiltrating Weyland-Yutani crew. As viewers will recall, Morrow was grooming Slightly to do his bidding in order to secure a Xenomorph.

That ultimately backfired when Slightly and Smee took refuge in some bushes to hide from Prodigy soldiers, and missed the Facehugger fall from Arthur’s body. While viewers familiar with the Alien canon know what was going to happen, the boys were shocked to discover the results of the Facehugger’s infiltration as Arthur became ill and suffered that all-too-familiar fate of the Chestburster, busting out of his ribs and through his shirt.

The events left the boys without a Xenomorph as the baby fled, and facing the reality of what they’d done to a man they’d been raised to see as a father figure.

Below, Rysdahl opens up about taking on the iconic death format and making it his own in the FX series. Plus, he reveals what it’s really like to wear one of those breathing Facehuggers.

Arthur’s demise begins when he sets his foot down and refuses to alter the hybrid’s minds and emotions. Why is it so important that he set that boundary?

David Rysdahl: Arthur comes into the season feeling like he’s doing something really good. There’s this race to live forever, and he’s a full believer in it. He and his wife [want to] do it the most ethical way possible, and Essie Davis, who plays Dame, and I talked a lot about the code of ethics that we’ve all signed. We believe that Boy Kavalier is going to adhere to this, which is naive. And then slowly things start to erode.

I thought a lot about the Manhattan Project and the scientists working on that, and the moment when they realized that what they believed in was being used for in ways that you did not expect. That’s what Arthur goes through. He goes through a crisis of faith in his science, in his company, and in his relationship with his wife. And the father and mother metaphor analogy that goes throughout it, and that moment with Dame is parents trying to understand how to deal with their children’s trauma.

The idea that you can erase your children’s trauma is, in some ways, a beautiful one, but it’s also violating. And as a scientist, he’s at a crisis, and also as a father, which he becomes throughout the season. It’s almost surprising how much he cares. And then by the end, he’s like, “What did I do? These are children, and they’re lost on this beach, and something has gone deeply wrong, and I just need to take care of them.” So that’s his arc, which is also his tragedy.

Speaking of the children, Arthur tells Slightly and Smee that he knows they’re lying. Does he have any inkling of what happened to him with the Facehugger? He has brief flashes of that event, but the conceit of the Facehugger is that the victim doesn’t remember what happened.

There’s that quote, the body keeps the receipts. I think he knows his body has been through something, so his subconscious is telling him, “You’re in grave danger. Something has gone very badly.” But in front of him are these two boys who are deeply afraid. He doesn’t know exactly what happened to him, but he knows that something bad has really happened. As an actor, I got to go do six hours of facehugging, which does something. You’re imagining the proboscis that’s going down [your throat] and having that on me as they carried me around for a good couple of weeks… that does something to you.

You put it on, and you feel it’s attacking you because you’ve done that emotional work of imagining what’s happening. So by the time it comes off and you’re sitting on that beach, your body in real life has told you that something’s happened to you. So you get to trust that whatever’s happening in that moment is right as an actor. And to trust that the nightmares there, for both you and the audience, and there are these two little boys who are scared.

FX

When did you discover Arthur’s fate, and was it exciting to take on the iconic Chestburster death?

Yeah, Noah [Hawley] told me that in our first meeting, and it was very exciting, and I was very honored. And then I instantly became very scared because everyone in the world seems to have seen the Chestburster scene. And so you’re playing in a very familiar sandbox, and you want to give an homage to what’s happened before while also doing something fresh. I thought about that death for eight months of the strikes. And then you have all these amazing artists, puppeteers, special effects that are doing it with you, the camera team, these other actors, and you’re shooting the actual Chestburster scene over the course of a couple of days. You do it on the beach, and then you have to do it on a platform because half of your body’s a dummy. And there’s always blood. There’s a guy at the table who’s getting squirted with blood. It’s really a familial affair to make this moment happen, which is what I love about filming in general. It takes all these artisans to come together to make a moment. And then that moment happens, and everyone’s cheering because you feel like you did it justice.

The horror of the scene really leans into the fact that Smee and Slightly have the minds of children, and while we know as an audience what’s about to happen, they don’t. Was that in the back of your mind while you were shooting the scene?

What’s beautiful about Adarsh [Gourav] and Jonathan [Ajayi] and their characters in general is they’re the most playful, the most innocent at the beginning of the series, and then they have the worst arc and really become jaded teens. They started as nine-year-olds who love the world and are silly, and then they’re jaded, they’ve seen how bad the world can be and how parents lie, and the guilt and shame of their own experience comes into how they’re playing it. So, I definitely talked about that with them.

Then [it was about how] to make that death as tragic for them as possible because the audience all know what’s going to happen throughout that whole season. So it’s not interesting, it’s what’s going to happen. And to watch them really come back together to see how these kids lie, and then he calls out the lie, and we’re seeing what we’ve been craving the whole season, is this emotional father and sons relationship. We’re seeing a really kind of human connection between these two. And that’s what’s interesting: the moment that they connect, it breaks apart.

What was it like working with the prosthetics team between the Facehugger and Chestburster?

They shot this over two weeks. Two weeks every day. The Weta team, in general, are huge fans. They all love it so much. I remember in Episode 3 when they’re dissecting a baby Xenomorph. I walked in to watch them shoot that, and they were just giggling while they were shooting it. So they brought that joy to every aspect. And specifically, Facehuggers, there was one that they used to fly at you. There’s one that they put around your head [with] rubber bands, they kind of cling to you. And then the ones that breathe, and there are two guys in two corners [of the room], and one’s controlling the breaths, and then the other one’s moving the fingers. So it’s a group of people, and every puppet has many people working on it to create that moment.

Was it tough having the Facehugger on you for so many scenes?

It was fun right away because you’re like, “I’m wearing a face hugger.” And then by the end of it, your body has this trauma that it’s been given. You have imagined what it’s like to have [one on you]; you can’t breathe very well. It’s not the most comfortable, but that’s good for an actor. You want it not to be comfortable. You want it to feel real in a way. And then after a couple of weeks of putting that on, you don’t look forward to it, your body’s telling you this is unsafe. So, you definitely have a visceral reaction to these things, which is the beauty of shooting in order, because then you get to have all that emotional collection of memories to bring into later scenes. And it just happens naturally. Your body’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing naturally in these moments.

One of Arthur’s final impactful moves is that he turns the trackers off for the hybrids in Episode 6. Was that heroic or naive of him? 

I think Arthur realizes how little he knows. He realizes that they’re way over their heads, and in that moment, he makes a choice out of emotion. The scientist is starting to fade, and the father and the guilt of what they’ve done are making the choices for him. And so that choice to do that, I don’t think he’s thinking about what’s going to happen to them. He just realizes that he has sold his soul to this corporation, which has very little concern for humans and very little concern about the future unless it’s for their selfish interests. It’s not a decision made out of any calculation. It is an impulse decision.

Alien: Earth, Tuesdays, 8/7c, FX