‘Alien: Earth’ star Timothy Olyphant on playing synth Kirsh

The Alien franchise doesn’t have the best track record with relying on synths, from Ian Holm’s Ash to Michael Fassbender’s David. David Jonsson’s Andy brought a little ethical nuance in Alien: Romulus. And in Noah Hawley’s FX series, Alien: Earth, Timothy Olyphant finds a complex character in Kirsh.

Prodigy’s chief scientist at the Neverland research facility and the overseer of The Lost Boys, the company’s hybrid group of androids with human consciousness, Kirsh is tasked with protecting and guiding these literally childlike minds as they’re deployed into disaster zones and begin to study alien life. As Mashable’s Belen Edwards writes in her review, “His monitoring of the Lost Boys doesn’t just read as very, very detached parenting, it also reads as him shepherding the next generation of tech that will make him obsolete. Tough gig.”

So, how does Olyphant himself see Kirsh?

“It appears to me that perhaps he sees in these Lost Boys a better humanity, a better world,” Olyphant told Mashable. “I think he feels that he is above and beyond everyone around him and and these kids represent something even better than him. I think there’s a part of him that is trying to get across to them that they can they can go beyond what I’ve been able to go beyond, what I’ve been able to do.”

As we’ve seen in the first three episodes of Alien: Earth, Kirsh is a stoic synth who seems to hold a distinct opinion about humanity — that life inevitably ends in death, and attachment is folly. “All we can do is watch and take names,” he says in episode 1.

We get a glimpse of Kirsh’s frank thoughts about the plight of humans in his monologue to Marcy/Wendy (Sydney Chandler) in episode 1, in which he tells her frankly that her brother, Joe (Alex Lawther) will eventually die. “Used to be food, you know. Humanity,” he says. “Your lives were short and filled with fear. Then your brains grew. You built tools and used them to conquer nature. You built impossible machines and went to space. You stopped being food. Or, I should say, you told yourself you weren’t food anymore.”

Adarsh Gourav, Timothy Olyphant, and Jonathan Ajayi in “Alien: Earth.”
Credit: Patrick Brown / FX

Notably, there’s a frankly hilarious scene in Alien: Earth episode 3, in which Olyphant shows Kirsh’s lack of understanding of the need for human connection with one sweeping motion. Kirsh, accompanied by hybrids Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), first encounters Weyland-Yutani vessel head of security Morrow (Babou Ceesay) aboard the crashed USCSS Maginot.

During this tense discussion, somehow the concept of friendship comes up amidst this alien-invested crash site. Standing defiantly behind Kirsh, Slightly proclaims in the most earnest way possible, “Everyone needs friends.” Reader, when I tell you the slow-turn that Olyphant delivers as Kirsh in the most pained expression, filled with almost second-hand embarrassment (a rarity for a synth), is one of the best things you’ll see on TV this year, I’m not kidding. “I have to admit, I don’t remember doing that,” says Olyphant.

But there’s a side of Kirsh we haven’t seen yet, which Olyphant only alludes to: “I think it’s tricky to trust what he’s really thinking.”

Alien: Earth episodes drop weekly on Hulu and FX at 8pm E.T. on Tuesdays.