Timothy Olyphant Joins ‘Alien’ TV Show

Timothy Olyphant has reportedly joined the upcoming Alien TV show, based on the iconic 1979 movie of the same name. Deadline reports that “details about Olyphant’s character are not being disclosed,” but that he will reportedly be playing “Kirsh, a synth who acts as a mentor and trainer for Chandler’s Wendy who is a hybrid, a meta-human who has the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult.”

The Alien TV series is written and directed by Noah Hawley, for FX on Hulu. The show is a prequel set thirty years before the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien. Hawley is well-known for creating the Marvel Comics series Legion, as well as the for the network. Notably, Olyphant and Hawley previously worked together on Season 4 of Fargo. In addition to Olyphant, the Alien series also stars Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young, and David Rysdahl.

Alien was written by Dan O’Bannon, and first opened in wide release in the United States on June 22, 1979. It stars Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto as the crew of a doomed crew of a commercial space tug who come face-to-face with a vicious creature — later learned to be Xenomorphs — after responding to the distress beacon from a nearby spaceship. The film’s budget has been estimated at around $11 million, with a box office revenue of close to $200 million.

Alien spawned a handful of sequels, with 1986’s Aliens being written and directed by James Cameron. The film was made on a budget of about $18 million and earned up to $181 million at the box office. In 1992, Alien 3 was released but received more mixed reviews than its predecessors. The David Fincher-directed film has since gone on to be somewhat of a cult classic.

The fourth Alien film, Alien Resurrection, opened on Nov. 26, 1997, and was written by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers). It was directed by French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet. In the 2000s, the xenomorphs returned in two crossover films with the Predator franchise: Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). 

In 2012, Scott came back to the Alien world with Prometheus, which told an origin story for the face-huggers. That film was followed up by 2017’s Alien: Covenant. Finally, a new Alien film is currently in development, though very little is known about the movie — Alien: Romulus — other than it’s being directed by Fede Alvarez, who helmed the 2013 remake of Evil Dead, and it will reportedly be a standalone story staring Isabela Merced (Dora and the Lost City of Gold) and Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla).