Alex Lawther doesn’t use AI. Or at least he tries not to. “I mean, I use Google on my phone,” the 30-year-old tells Big Issue. “So I do get those AI overview boxes. It’s oftentimes wrong.”
The British actor is one of the stars of the new Alien spin-off series, set two years before the original 1979 Ridley Scott film. Lawther plays CJ Hermit, a human soldier whose sister, Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, gets turned into the first human-synthetic hybrid (an artificial body with an AI-integrated human mind).
While the original films focused on the Xenomorph alien as the main threat, Alien: Earth shifts to how humans use artificial intelligence, and how unchecked advancing technology is used for their own gain.
“The show asks some big questions,” Lawther says. “The central character, Wendy, is a prototype for the possibility of eternal life by putting human consciousness into an artificial adult body. That plus the alienness of it equals provocation about what it is to be human as we develop the technology of artificial intelligence. These are things we don’t have answers for and we’re sort of catching up with them as we’re developing this technology.”
This isn’t Lawther’s first time exploring alienness. Most recently he played Karis Nemik in season one of Andor, a Star Wars series. For many, being a part of these universes would be a childhood dream come true, but Lawther admits he spent his childhood with his head in books rather than looking to the stars.
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“I wasn’t not a sci-fi fan,” he says. “But I wasn’t collecting trading cards either. That was my brother’s thing. I would look at his trading cards and loved the shiny ones… but not know how to play.
“It’s sort of a surprise what comes your way as an actor. I suppose it’s both the alienness of it, but also I’m really a fan of [director] Noah Hawley and his work on Fargo and Legion, and someone who can take really well-loved source material and go quite far with it.”
Before filming began on the Alien spin-off, production was delayed due to the SAG-AFTRA strike in 2023.
The strike was partly the result of concerns about the impact of AI on performers’ livelihoods and rights, and provisions were subsequently put in place to protect actors’ images, voices and performances.
“It was about AI and the royalties that people get paid,” Lawther says. “AI was a big part of that conversation. But when you’re in that sci-fi world, the metaphors seem so big that you don’t spend – or I didn’t spend – a lot of time connecting them.
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“There’s an unnervingness to how quickly AI is moving, in the same way that people felt about the internet when it first became part of everybody’s day-to-day life. It’s moving so quickly, but it’s still in its infancy as well.”
(From left) Alex Lawther as Hermit, Diêm Camille as Siberian, Moe Bar-El as Rashidi in Alien: Earth. Image: Patrick Brown / FX
Despite the adoption of AI by millions of people around the world, the technology isn’t always accurate, and chat models have been known to fabricate false information or misleading facts and present them as true. This is termed ‘hallucination’.
“I love that idea that AI can hallucinate,” Lawther says, almost gleefully. “It’s like such an anthropomorphic word, it’s such a human idea. And obviously it’s just our way of describing what is basically a glitch in the machine.”
Hallucinations may be relatively harmless via a chatbot, but it’s a ‘glitch in the machine’ that has led to so many AI-based sci-fi antagonists leading humans to their destruction. The murderous Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Skynet from the Terminator franchise, or Ultron from Marvel Comics. The technology in Alien: Earth feels like it’s on a similar path, so the question arises, do human beings deserve to survive?
“Do we deserve to survive?” Lawther repeats. “I think we are capable of such violence but I don’t know if that means that we don’t deserve to survive. We are very good at making things worse for ourselves.
“I immediately think about the environmental crisis that we’re in the midst of, and how we’re running headlong in and not decelerating. But I also think that’s true with how much of an uphill battle it feels like to get people to do anything about the people starving in Gaza right now.”
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The day before we meet, Lawther joined an emergency protest outside Downing Street to demand the government take action on the famine in Gaza.
Lawther says, “There’s an amazing artist called Nan Goldin, she was speaking with a French writer called Édouard Louis. They had come to talk to each other as artists, but they ended up speaking about Gaza and their outrage.
“Someone in the audience said: ‘You know we’ve come here to listen to you talk as artists, not to make a political statement.’ And she replied: ‘It’s more important to be a mouth than it is to be an artist at times like these.’
He cites Greta Thunberg’s campaigning on Gaza.
“People like that make me hopeful. And she’s only 22. She’s so clear sighted. I don’t have a particular plan, but I happily follow voices like those people. And people like that are why humans deserve to survive.”
Alien: Earth launches 13 August on Disney+ in the UK.
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