September 24, 2025 | by ltcinsuranceshopper
Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for the Alien: Earth finale.
It doesn’t matter if he’s shared some variation of the same elsewhere before this; if you’ve been gifted the chance to talk with Olyphant at length, like I have for his latest role in Alien: Earth, you know better than to interrupt. Throughout all that we’ve spoken about so far — with Noah Hawley’s smash-hit FX series chief among them — one thing that becomes immediately apparent is that the 57-year-old actor will reach the point he’s ultimately trying to make, even if he takes the scenic route in getting there. Right now, Olyphant’s reminding me about Deadwood and the late Ralph Richeson, a background extra whom series creator Milch tapped for a bigger role — and who would go on to appear in 20 of the HBO Western’s 36 episodes as Richardson, the Grand Central Hotel’s eccentric chef who had a unique fixation with deer antlers.
The latter wouldn’t have even appeared on-screen, Olyphant adds, if Milch hadn’t plucked them out of a basket on set and told Richeson to act as though “they had divine powers.” That direction lent itself to a subtle throughline for a recurring character that perhaps even the most diehard Deadwood fans haven’t picked up on in the years since the original series’ conclusion, but the seeds were sown early on.
And herein lies the point of that Milch story: Hawley is someone whom the actor compares to Deadwood’s creator dropping those narrative breadcrumbs, only to pay them off weeks later. Take a particular scene in Alien: Earth Episode 4 between Olyphant’s stoic synthetic, Kirsh, and Adarsh Gourav’s Slightly, a hybrid with a young human’s consciousness placed into a synth’s body. Kirsh, after noticing Slightly’s wall adornment of the Japanese three wise monkeys, pauses to wax philosophical about the true meaning of something that’s been in the background of multiple scenes before this moment.
Olyphant confesses that he’d almost prefer not to know which came first: the set decoration, or the monkey monologue Hawley wrote for him. “He set it up pretty freaking early,” the actor adds, before leaning forward, eyebrows quirked, and following up his winding Milch detour with a punchline that has both of us laughing: “Point being? That guy’s thinking.”
Although Olyphant has a lot of admiration for writers who embrace the long game, both the setup and the payoff, he’s aware that his current path was laid courtesy of a much more spontaneous decision early on.
“My whole career is based on a big giant left turn,” he muses, sunglasses perched on top of his head and Corona in hand as he relaxes on the back deck of his Los Angeles home on the eve of Alien: Earth’s August 12 premiere. It’s an effortlessly relaxed, undeniably cool air that sets the tone early on for our entire conversation, even though we’re talking through a screen. “I mean, I was an art major,” he says. “I was painting ceramics!” As he’s revealed in previous interviews, the mere thought of acting was mortifying, so getting his fine arts degree at USC, where he was also recruited to swim for the Trojans, seemed like a perfect fit at the time. Yet there was always a part of him that felt an inexplicable pull towards acting. If nothing else, this was something he could try on for size to see if it fit.
“I figured I’d give it a shot, just to try to avoid a midlife crisis,” Olyphant jests. He’s immediate in crediting his wife, Alexis, with pointing out the glaringly obvious while he was wrestling with the idea of pursuing this pipe dream. “[She] said, ‘You’ve never mentioned this before, and you’ve never done it, so why would you think you could?’” Without even one school play credit to his name, Olyphant and his wife moved to New York, where he went through a two-year acting program at the William Esper Studio.
A string of small roles followed — his movie debut in 1996’s The First Wives Club, paid gigs in television pilots, one-off parts that didn’t amount to a recurring presence. Scream 2, a year later, was the job that Olyphant has since gone on to describe as a “gift,” despite playing one of the film’s two Ghostfaces, and it’s not difficult to see why. From that point on, the parts seemed to start rolling in, including one of Sex and the City’s most memorable guest-starring roles in its first season, the crime comedy film Go, the action flick Gone in 60 Seconds, and the rom-com The Girl Next Door. But it wasn’t until 2004, when Olyphant stepped out with a mustache and cowboy hat donned to play Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood, that audiences seemed to sit up and really take notice.
David Milch is the gift that just keeps on giving.
On the HBO series, Olyphant’s Bullock was positioned as a bulwark of sorts. Although he wore a literal black hat, he operated as the lawfully good sheriff of Deadwood, butting up against much less honorable characters, particularly Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen. While the two men are immediately positioned at odds due to Bullock’s honorable nature and Swearengen’s lean toward less-than-legal dealings, they forge a begrudging partnership over the course of Deadwood’s short-lived run. While the original show was canceled after three seasons, a majority of the cast returned for a feature-length continuation in 2019, titled Deadwood: The Movie. It was a reunion that proved bittersweet in light of Milch’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, which he publicly disclosed before beginning work on the film’s script. But it also enabled both the creator and the actors to bring the Deadwood story to a proper conclusion. For Olyphant, his career seems to be divided into two distinct periods: before Deadwood and after.
“David Milch is the gift that just keeps on giving. He has been like a little fucking man on my shoulder,” the actor declares, when I bring up his time on the HBO series, which included, among iconic onscreen moments, at least one significant creative pivot from Milch behind the scenes that resulted in the death of Bullock’s stepson, William, in Season 2. It’s an anecdote that Olyphant himself has told more than once in interviews, and when I reference it again now, he smiles as if there’s either an inside joke that exists between the two of us or he’s preparing to let me in on a new one. But it’s his relationship with Milch, he adds, that has informed his approach to acting now — an openness to spontaneity, and the great art that can result from still making those sudden left turns.
“Ever since I walked on that set, and maybe even more so after I walked off that set… what I watched and observed daily was a man who had done so much homework and was so well-versed in the world and the history and what his intentions were, and yet was so willing to throw it all out the window based on something he saw right in front of him,” Olyphant says. “I think anyone who is a fan of great drama, great writers, great painters, you see that. That’s 10, 20, 30, 40 years of experience meets a willingness to just say ‘Fuck it.’ It’s a beautiful thing to watch — and I feel like, to some degree, I’ve probably been chasing that ever since.”
On the heels of his star-making turns in both Deadwood and FX’s Justified, one might almost be tempted to ask whether Olyphant has been concerned about being typecast as the seemingly laidback lawman who happens to be as quick with words as he is on the draw — or even simply perceived by audiences that way. The past several years have seen him inhabiting a very specific type of character on television. There was the space marshal in Star Wars’ galaxy far, far away, plus the U.S. Marshal in Season 4 of Hawley’s anthology series set in the world of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, as well as his return to the role of Raylan Givens for 2023’s Justified: City Primeval miniseries. We’ve been circling back to the topic of career reinvention again and again, so now seems like the right time to ask: what was it about the idea of joining an Alien TV show, of all things, that put Olyphant’s head on a swivel?
“Just two words,” he reveals. “Noah Hawley.” Development on the FX series had been long-gestating, with the initial announcement coming as early as 2019, but it wasn’t until Olyphant got a call directly from Hawley that he let himself grin about the potential of playing in the Alien universe — but this far into his career, he’s also very familiar with guarding himself against too much hope on the off-chance an opportunity doesn’t move forward. “I’ve gotten pretty good at taking a peek and saying, ‘Even if this doesn’t end up being a thing, that phone call, that conversation means a great deal to me.’”
It may have helped that the role Hawley had Olyphant in mind for was keenly different from anything he’d ever “taken a swing at” before, as the actor puts it. Playing Kirsh, the Prodigy Corporation’s synthetic chief scientist, required him to bleach not just his hair but his eyebrows for the duration of filming. That physical transformation became an unexpectedly lengthy affair when Alien: Earth’s production was impacted by delays as a result of both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, but there was added pressure, Olyphant admits, in the knowledge that Hawley had written the role of Kirsh just for him.
“It was both familiar and yet foreign all at the same time, and that’s a ton of fun, to be in that place.” But within the process of trying to figure out his character’s movement and emoting potential, Olyphant was aware of just how wild a swing this could all be, especially for an audience expecting a certain type of character from him. “In my little world, it felt like, ‘Oh, this could not work. This could be a risk.’”
By his own admission, he paid some attention to the series’ early reviews, which he likens to finally “hearing the echo back” after the year-long process the cast spent filming the series in Thailand. For Olyphant, the experience of making any show isn’t complete until the reactions start rolling in, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t relieved that this more recent left turn seems to have paid off. “I’m very pleased that it seems like a good fit. I’m very pleased that it doesn’t seem like, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’” he adds, punctuating with a laugh.
Alien: Earth certainly doubled as a welcome reunion between showrunner and actor after Olyphant’s previous stint on Fargo, even if stepping into the shoes of a character unlike anyone he’d ever played before was its own form of intimidation. With Hawley keeping the train “firmly on the tracks” through his scripts, the actor felt more empowered to embrace the unpredictable on the performance side of things.
“I think that level of freedom comes from 30 years of experience and an edible,” Olyphant initially jokes, when the conversation turns to his repeated collaboration with the screenwriter and director. “I know when I’m working with Noah that by the time we show up to set, if I just hit my marks and say my lines, the scenes can be pretty good. After that, I’m trying to not get in my own way, get in his way, the other actors’ way. I’m just showing up looking for opportunities for spontaneous behavior or the unexpected.”
It also becomes abundantly clear in speaking with Olyphant that he never wants to be accused of phoning it in. In every one of his Alien: Earth scenes, it doesn’t matter how many lines of dialogue he has to deliver — you can still see the cogs, metaphorical and perhaps a bit literal, turning inside Kirsh’s head, whether he’s dealing with the gaggle of hybrids externally dubbed the Lost Boys or on the receiving end of ire from Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), Prodigy’s billionaire CEO with a visible Peter Pan complex and almost nonexistent impulse control.
More than anyone else, Olyphant reveals he would have been the one most disappointed in himself for not seizing the opportunity to take yet another risk, ultimately settling on a synthetic characterization for Kirsh that feels somewhere between Ian Holm’s (whom Olyphant describes as “hiding the ball” in Ridley Scott’s Alien) and Michael Fassbender’s (“strange behavior”). With that spectrum in mind, Olyphant adds, the worst thing that could happen was his take on Kirsh being labeled as completely artificial, coming from him.
“I didn’t want it to be like, ‘Wow, you’re just being lazy,’ and, to some degree, I felt a certain expectation to do something. I feel like I have a pretty good sense of story, and I know that the job calls for something that separates him from the others, whether that’s behavior or purely aesthetic, how he looks. The thing that’s frightening is that you’re going to feel like it’s forced, or ‘Oh, you’re just being you. You’re just fucking around.’”
I’m not interested in repeating myself take to take.
If there’s one thing that Olyphant very much wants to avoid, it’s coming off as pretentious, especially when we start discussing his Alien: Earth role more in-depth. There’s a physical stillness in Kirsh that Alien’s synthetics have become well-known for, which seems to rein Olyphant in even more than characters like Seth Bullock and Raylan Givens did, even if there’s still a certain, undeniable gleam in his eye from time to time. Kirsh, for which no movement appears random or unintentional, also couldn’t be further from the delightfully spastic Joel Hammond of Netflix’s woefully short-lived horror comedy series, Santa Clarita Diet. But Olyphant didn’t necessarily approach the role with advanced consideration for how much space he’d be taking up onscreen, despite arguably being the biggest name within Alien: Earth’s cast. As he tells it, playing Kirsh involved getting to push more boundaries, rather than becoming too boxed in.
“The short answer is, I’m making this shit up as I go,” Olyphant says, with a chuckle. “The long-winded answer — and I’ll throw up in my mouth as I start to say it — is I’m aware of the world. I’m aware of the time. I’m aware of what I think is the thing that Noah’s trying to get across, and I act accordingly. After that is games. It’s just pure games.”
Rather than borrowing from the likes of Holm and Fassbender, Olyphant made it a personal challenge to see how far he could straddle the line between stiffly mechanical and unnervingly human. “I kept trying to see how much I could go in both directions at the same time, to take moment to moment and just see what I could get away with, and without it feeling forced.” The intention, he shares, was to give Hawley a greater range to work with in the editing process: “I trust him, and it was always fun to see how far I could go in either direction and trust the scene would still hold together.”
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It’s within this current train of thought that I can see him becoming more pensive — because while we happen to be discussing a very specific show at a very specific time in his career, it feels like Olyphant is revealing his current philosophy when it comes to acting, including a desire to live in every minute on-set as it happens.
“I’m not interested in repeating myself take to take. I’m not interested in trying to get it right. I’m interested in seeing what happens, and trusting that the work that we did before we got there was diligent and thorough.” It’s an attitude that has shifted his approach to his scene partners, too; when acting opposite Alien: Earth co-stars like Sydney Chandler and Babou Ceesay, he found himself subconsciously observing their choices and reflecting on them more intentionally after the director called cut. “If I remember everything they did, I can think, ‘I love when she did this, and I love when she made that decision and that commitment.’ I never saw that before. That was the first time I noticed that.”
This is the part where we start diving into finale spoilers — because even though Alien: Earth has yet to air, at this moment, outside of the premiere’s sneak preview at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, there are some terrifically juicy scenes in the first season’s later episodes that are worth dissecting. While Kirsh has mostly been saddled with minding Prodigy’s hybrids, played by a group of young actors that Olyphant refers to as “a joy” to work with — as well as “fully committed, professional, and willing to play” — there’s one particular face-off, between him and Ceesay, that I’ve been hoping to get his thoughts on.
In order to properly set the stage for Kirsh and Morrow’s knockdown, drag-out fight sequence in the finale, you have to first rewind to Episode 6, “The Fly,” co-written by Hawley and Lisa Long. It’s the first installment that drops right after a significant flashback, in which all of the terrifying horrors visited on the ill-fated crew of Weyland-Yutani’s research vessel Maginot are fully realized. It’s also an episode that viewers tune into with newly added context about Ceesay’s Morrow, the Maginot’s chief security officer, who has close familial loss in his past, a deeply personal reason for his loyalty to Weyland-Yutani, and a complicated outlook on his own existence as a cyborg — part man, part machine.
While it’d be impossible to make an Alien TV show without some level of commentary on humanity, Hawley’s Alien: Earth grapples with the subject of identity on multiple levels through the three types of beings that point to the possibility of immortality: cyborgs, synthetics, and the newly-created hybrids. A hierarchical structure begins to emerge over the course of the season, especially as Prodigy learns firsthand that the hybrids are too unpredictable to rein in and too powerful to ignore. But it may come as little surprise that Kirsh, a completely mechanical being, would look down on Morrow’s cybernetic enhancements with disdain.
Is he threatening his life, or is he asking him to launch?
In Episode 6, the two characters cross paths at Weyland-Yutani headquarters in the wake of a combative meeting between their respective employers. When I speak with Ceesay in anticipation of the finale, he recounts how Hawley first described it to him: “It’s just two guys with the weight of the corporations on their shoulders in an elevator having a chat.” The exchange that plays out is a prelude to their finale clash in every sense of the word, with Kirsh and Morrow elegantly trading barbs, but it’s also an excellent summation of some of Alien: Earth’s biggest themes.
Olyphant compares the elevator scene to “a Justified scene dressed up as Alien,” which, on the day, also leaned into both the familiar and the foreign for him. “It was like, ‘Oh, no, wait, I know this. I played this game for years. It’s two guys that want to kill each other, but they also might be best friends.”
While it might be a stretch to consider Kirsh and Morrow anywhere close to the complex relationship that persisted, despite odds, between Raylan Givens and Walton Goggins’ Boyd Crowder on Justified, Episode 6’s tense encounter unmistakably bears shades of all the traits that Olyphant is so good at encapsulating, so it’s no surprise it became one of his favorite scenes to play. “Is he threatening his life, or is he asking him to launch? That felt very comfortable — and that’s also a game of thinking, ‘I’m pretty sure this is how this scene wants to go. We want to be in this little sweet spot.’ It’s fun to play that in a totally different genre with a different type of actor, and still find that familiar game.”
It’s a meeting that Hawley undoubtedly pays off in this week’s finale, “The Real Monsters,” which he co-wrote with Migizi Pensoneau, but Olyphant can’t pinpoint which specific narrative swerve stemmed from him and which came from his showrunner. “It’s hard to remember how much we spoke about or how much is an unsaid collaboration. He gives me some pages, and maybe we talk a little bit, or, dare I say, every now and then, I give a note, or at least ask some questions.” There’s also Hawley’s aforementioned willingness to pivot based on what his cast delivers on set: “One of my favorite things about Noah is that he has in mind what he’s written, and then, either because I interpreted it slightly differently or once it’s brought to life, it feels like then he starts writing to what he saw.
“I do remember one day him saying, ‘I think I know what it wants to be, you two coming together,’” the actor recounts, “and I said, ‘Can I ask you a question? Is there violence involved?’ And he goes, ‘I suppose there could be.’ And I was like, ‘It’d be nice if there was.’” It’s easy for Olyphant to look back on that exchange with an utterly charming grin, as he does now, but, perhaps per his wishes, Alien: Earth’s rematch between synthetic and cyborg is arguably one of the finale’s most violent moments.
When Morrow escapes his holding cell on Prodigy’s Neverland island and goes on the warpath, it seems inevitable that he and Kirsh will have another confrontation, but what no viewer could have predicted is who ultimately winds up on top. Working alongside stunt coordinator Rob Inch, Olyphant and Ceesay were able to rehearse their fight several times before cameras rolled on this clash between titans.
“The thing that really shook us both?” Ceesay reveals in our finale post-mortem several weeks later. “We committed. There was nowhere else to go. You had to commit to literally grappling and pushing each other. And Tim is strong. My goodness, when he gets into a locked position, you’re not moving him an inch. It’s amazing.” While the sequence ultimately culminates with Kirsh incapacitated by way of a broken back and Morrow knocked out by Slightly, behind the scenes, the two actors were having the time of their lives. “Off-camera, we’re laughing. I’ve got loads of pictures of us just smiling and with my messed-up eye, and blood all over me. It’s beautiful,” Ceesay says. “But my favorite thing about that fight scene is Tim’s face. He has this deadpan synth look throughout, and I just kept falling apart laughing while we were doing it.”
Olyphant similarly has nothing but high praise for the co-star he was in the physical trenches with, who delivers an epic speech about John Henry competing against a steam engine. “I was laying on the ground, upside down, looking up at him while he was performing, and I was like, ‘I’m in Alien meets Shakespeare in the Park.’ It’s so fucking good. He has such command. It’s really a joy to watch.”
In the closing minutes of Alien: Earth’s season finale, both Kirsh and Morrow, among other ill-fated characters, are being held captive in one of the cells on Prodigy’s Neverland research island, with Chandler’s Wendy and the surviving hybrids standing in position to rule things — with the help of at least one xenomorph ally. As Weyland-Yutani forces hone in and Pearl Jam’s “Animal” launches the closing credits, it’s an ending that unquestionably leaves the door open for the story to continue. It’s also the kind of ending that Olyphant appreciates the most on television, having seen or been a part of too many shows that attempt to draw a roadmap without knowing the final destination.
“The pitfall of television is that, and you can feel it as a viewer, as great as some shows are, you can tell that they don’t know the ending, and the ending is what makes us give stories meaning. But Noah writes television with an ending in mind, and you can feel that when you read his work, when you show up on set,” he says. “The danger sometimes with TV is you get a great scene, but if you took it out of the episode, who gives a shit, right, if it doesn’t affect anything else? It’s a terrible feeling, because sometimes they’re great scenes.”
Olyphant doesn’t have that concern in working with Hawley, whose storytelling approach he describes as “dominoes knocking other dominoes.” It’s an apropos metaphor, especially taking into account how the last three episodes of Alien: Earth, in which everything goes sideways on Prodigy’s island, feel like the equivalent of a snowball rapidly building into an avalanche.
“That’s such a nice feeling, as an actor, to feel like everything you’re doing is setting up something else,” Olyphant tells me. “I’m guilty of being aware of it when I’m acting. I know the audience is in that little camera over there. That’s where they’re all sitting. And just like an audience in the theater, you have a sense of whether they’re leaning in or not. You can feel the story build. You can feel when there’s too much air, or when you could cut a scene. And I hate that feeling.”
Hawley himself has previously stated that he always planned for Alien: Earth to be a recurring series, with each subsequent season only getting “bigger” in scale and “more intense,” especially with the growing alien threat on the Neverland research island poised to break containment. With that in mind, it seems important to ask Olyphant whether he’d be interested in returning, should the series earn a renewal. He doesn’t even hesitate before answering.
“I’d show up.” In a fashion that has carried through our entire talk, though, he’s also willing to elaborate further. “Noah knows that. We had that conversation when it started. I knew he felt that there were a couple of chapters left to tell. We talked about that early on, that this was something that could have a little more life, and I knew that Noah wanted me to be a part of that. That was not a difficult decision, to commit to what he thought he needed. He’s two for two with me. And I’ve seen his other work. He’s batting a thousand. This is one of those special gigs. This is an easy one to show up for.”
Olyphant’s willingness to reprise his Alien: Earth role in the wake of several other recent revisits could certainly point to an actor who’d prefer to stick with the familiar, but it turns out he’s actually been pondering the idea of embracing even more of those left turns moving forward. “I’m very intrigued by the idea of people who just reinvent themselves,” he admits. “It’s been on my mind a lot lately. Actually, a lot of people do it because of the midlife crisis, but I’m really interested in the idea of doing it just because.”
So what’s stopping him this time around? “I’m a wuss,” Olyphant quips, with that inside-joke smile of his. “I don’t want to give up magazine covers.”
Photography: Hamish Robertson | Location: The Hammer Museum | Stylist: Grace Olyphant
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