• Alien: Earth review — a nasty, queasy and frequently terrific prequel

In a masterstroke of casting Kirsh is played by Timothy Olyphant, owner of one of the most ice-cool gazes in the business, as seen in everything from Justified and The Mandalorian to Curb Your Enthusiasm and Fargo, another film-to-TV spin-off made by the Alien: Earth writer-director Noah Hawley. Kirsh is arguably the most compelling character in a series where all the players, including the eyeball octopus, seem to be vying to steal the show from one another.

Olyphant: “The sheep is the star, we got cast and crew T-shirts made”

MAARTEN DE BOER/GETTY IMAGES

“That sheep is grotesque,” Olyphant says in agreement. “We were saying from the off that the sheep is the star. We got cast and crew T-shirts made.” If Olyphant is subzero in Alien: Earth, he is easygoing and funny off screen, casual enough to do our interview, which takes place over video call, from behind the wheel of his car after pulling up outside some sun-blessed locale in Santa Monica. Wearing a vintage guitar T-shirt and dark sunglasses, he looks like a moneyed veteran of the indie rock scene, happy to talk about everything from artificial intelligence to Clint Eastwood to his connection to the Vanderbilt dynasty of America’s Gilded Age (of which more later).

Alien: Earth can be horrifically gory, I say (wait till you see the acid-spouting giant bluebottle). Olyphant counters that it is “good family fun while asking some big questions”. Family fun — really? “Oh, come on! It passes the 12-year-old boy test!” he replies. As the father of an 11-year-old I would say this is debatable but on the subject of the show being scary — scary enough for Weaver to say she prefers not to watch it alone — Olyphant says with dry understatement, “The future is quite troubling.”

He makes the surprising suggestion that his Kirsh is a comedic performance. “I mean, I watched an episode last night in which the [human] brother of [the superintelligent hybrid] Wendy asks how he can take care of his sister, and Kirsh tells him, ‘That’s like an onion asking, how do I take care of a star?’” Olyphant finds this hilarious.

He’s certainly right in saying that the show, which is set in 2120, speaks to our anxieties about the future while being a dark reflection on the present. Human greed and the race to own technology are central to the plot. Kirsh’s obnoxious tech billionaire boss, the Boy Kavalier, played by Samuel Blenkin, is as much a monster as the aliens. And while Hawley hasn’t quite said that the character is based on Elon Musk, the Boy Kavalier’s “impulse control issues”, as Kirsh puts it to him, seem to invite the viewer to draw parallels.

Then there is the way the narrative feeds into our fear that AI is on the cusp of outmanoeuvring us. Kirsh, a “synth”, or fully artificial humanoid, observes the venal foolishness of humans with detached interest. In one key moment alone with his enemy Morrow (Babou Ceesay) — a cyborg, or cybernetically enhanced human — the two trade notes on each other’s superhuman limitations. Kirsh tells Morrow that feeling pain must be satisfying because it’s “that moment when you realise you’re not a machine after all”.

With his chiselled jaw and bleached blonde hair, Kirsh certainly looks very retrofuturistic sci-fi or, I suggest, like a missing member of the Police. Olyphant’s grin widens, the LA sky blue through his sunroof. “That Sting vibe in David Lynch’s Dune — I was a big fan of that look. The Rutger Hauer look in Blade Runner was on our mind too.”

As it happens, while filming Alien: Earth in Thailand the locals thought Olyphant was another Eighties star. “My wife and one of my sons visited a bar and we hadn’t been in there more than a minute when the band started jamming Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell and people were pointing at me. I said, ‘I hate to disappoint, but …’” He drifts off into the merits of Idol’s Eyes Without a Face.

Like Ian Holm’s Ash in the original Alien film, the character of Kirsh raises the question of how much an artificial intelligence’s experience of reality will (one day, at least) differ from a human’s. You’d need a professor of cognitive science to answer that, but for his part Olyphant takes a very LA view of things.

“Just the other day I was in a driverless car in Venice [in LA] that almost hit another car,” he says. “The guy in the other car was at fault. He immediately held up his hands to apologise to the driverless car. And it occurred to me that it shouldn’t be that long before the robot talks back with a personality. Aren’t we just a second away from droids cruising around, and the people talking with the droids and telling them they’re idiots?”

Does the inexorable expansion of AI bother him? “I’m struggling with how much I enjoy driverless cars,” he says. “That’s my biggest concern.”

• Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews

Olyphant was a comedian in former life, which is why he has a hard time keeping the conversation on a serious level. After university in south California, where he studied fine arts and swam competitively, he spent several months on the New York stand-up scene in the Nineties.

“A friend is Sarah Silverman, we were doing open mic at the same time,” he says. “He won’t remember this but Dave Chappelle showed up at the time — as a teenager. It was just a blip where I got to put my tongue in the water and before I decided, ‘I don’t think this is for me,’ and thought I’d go take an acting class.”

Since then there have been comparisons with Clint Eastwood, particularly when it comes to Olyphant’s roles in westerns. To understand why, you need to see him as Elmore Leonard’s sexy US marshal Raylan Givens in Justified (2010-15), or opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, or pastiching Eastwood himself in the animated comedy Rango. And it could be that Eastwood saw something of himself in the young actor because, as Olyphant explains, Eastwood “gave me my first professional gig”. It was in a TV pilot, although it didn’t quite work out. “Between me getting the job and showing up in LA for the read-through, he quit,” he says.

As US Marshal Raylan Givens in Justified

PRASHANT GUPTA

The two actors had already crossed paths, though. “I actually met Clint when I was 12 years old. We were up in Carmel [in California] and he was at his bar, the Hog’s Breath, and he asked my brother and me to help him out. The fact that at the height of his fame — we’re talking the 1970s — and he’s hanging out behind the bar or getting ice with two kids … it made quite an impression on me, the way he does things. And he’s still doing it in his nineties, like an old blues player, as opposed to chasing this fountain of youth. It seems to be the way to do it.”

The 57-year-old Olyphant’s CV is as long as your arm, filled with dozens of mid-level films as well as the magnificent Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He plays down rumours that he’ll return in its sequel opposite Brad Pitt. “All I know is that when I hang up with you, I’m gonna go do ceramics,” he says. “That’s my plan!” However, it was two big American series that made him an internet fan favourite — first Deadwood (“working opposite Ian McShane was a lesson in what to do, how to act”), and then Justified, where he was matched for charisma only by his co-star Walton Goggins (The White Lotus), a friend ever since.

Olyphant with Ian McShane in Deadwood

HBO/ALAMY

Olyphant’s name is pronounced “like elephant, of Scottish origin”, he says, but his striking looks are also the product of English, German, Dutch and Irish ancestry. This is where his aristocratic connections come in. “Yeah, my grandmother was a Vanderbilt and it’s a trip. She grew up in New York City — her childhood home is now the Russian embassy. My childhood home was just a little house in Modesto. Somebody lost the money along the way.”

He’s doing OK now, though, with what seems an annoyingly perfect life: the ideal level of fame, a 34-year marriage to his college sweetheart, three children. “You know, I’d love to say it was all by design,” Olyphant says with a laugh, “but I think I just got lucky failing at the right things. And all the other things that worked out seemed to be the important things.”

And with that Olyphant is off into the sunshine, leaving me to consider not so much gore and aliens as the LA dream.
Alien: Earth is out now on Disney+

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