Alien has gone through lots of permutations over the years. The franchise has dabbled in horror, action, science fiction, and has even gone the reboot/prequel route with the polarizing Prometheus (2012). There’s seemingly endless possibilities when it comes to telling stories about the titular monster, and the franchise has recently announced plans to cross over into another frontier: television.
Alien will be getting the small screen treatment on FX. The series has already put together a killer roster of talent, but the latest cast addition proves that it is not messing around. Kit Young will be playing a character named Tootles, who lived several decades before the events of the original 1979 film, according to Deadline.
Young is best known for playing Jesper Fahey on Netflix’s Shadow and Bone. The actor broke out in a big way thanks to the supernatural series, with many critics and fans singling him out as one of the best performers. Young is still part of the series, but a prominent role in a franchise as legendary as Alien is sure to boost his profile.
Young will be appearing alongside Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav and Samuel Blenkin. While character names have been given for each of their characters, little has been revealed about their professions, or how they factor into the story. It’s also unclear whether the series will set up the events of the aforementioned Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (2017), given that both films take place years later.
What is clear is the different direction Noah Hawley wants to take the franchise. The showrunner and executive producer told Deadline that the Alien series will not mess with established characters, but instead focus on societal issues within the established world.
“They’re about humanity trapped between our primordial, parasitic past and our artificial intelligence future—and they’re both trying to kill us,” Hawley explained. “Here you have human beings and they can’t go forward and they can’t go back. [The series will examine] inequality as it juxtaposes the people you send to do the dirty work with the people who are sending them.”
The desire to broaden the diversity of the Alien franchise makes sense, given the wide range of performers that have been cast. “You will see what happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved,” Hawley added. “If we as a society can’t figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what’s going to happen to us?”
While the news of Young’s casting is an exciting development for the series, production has effectively been halted due to the ongoing writers and actors strike. An insider told the outlet that the cast has been sent home, but crew members have kept working and preparing sets in Thailand for when the strike is finally resolved.
Young was last seen in the Netflix film The School for Good and Evil (2022), and will also appear in the upcoming sports drama The Beautiful Game opposite Bill Nighy and Valeria Golino. A release date for the latter has not been announced, but IMDb has confirmed that it has completed filming.
