RESIDENT ALIEN
DARK HORSE COMICS SERIES RESIDENT ALIEN IS COMING TO THE SMALL SCREEN. SHOWRUNNER CHRIS SHERIDAN TELLS US MORE
Comic book extraterrestrial assumes the human form of Alan Tudyk.
2020
WAS A NIGHTMARE year, made worse by humanity’s cumulative stupidity, so maybe what we truly deserve in 2021 is an alien invasion that wipes us all out. The new Syfy series Resident Alien, based on the Dark Horse comics created by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, pretty much offers that scenario, albeit with a much funnier outcome.
Toplining a TV series for the first time, actor Alan Tudyk (Wash in Firefly) essentially takes on something of a dual role in the show. On the face of it, he’s Harry Vanderspeigle, a doctor in rural Patience, Colorado. But at the same time, he’s also playing the alien who accidentally crash-landed on Earth, murdered poor Harry, and now walks around with the doc’s likeness pretending to be him. The alien just has to sell the ruse long enough to fix his ship and then fulfill his overall mission of destroying Earth.
LOVING THE ALIEN
The comic first appeared in 2012, with five miniseries released so far and a sixth on the way. But it was in 2015 that Dark Horse started developing the title into a potential series. It landed on the desk of long-time Family Guy executive producer Chris Sheridan. The publishers asked him if he was interested in taking a crack at it, and he gave the comic a read. “I absolutely fell in love with it and knew I had a take on it,” Sheridan tells SFX.
The showrunner says he started the adaptation process by figuring out what could survive from the page into a live-action series. “The biggest thing I changed was that in the graphic novel, the reader sees Harry just as the alien the entire time,” he explains. “The reader never knows what that human looks like that everyone else is seeing him as. Was it even possible to shoot it that way?”
He assessed that that particular problem was two-fold. “From a production standpoint, it’s difficult and very, very expensive to have an actor just in a mask the entire time and have it look really real,” he details. “Movies can get away with it because they have these huge budgets, but it’s not quite as believable in TV.
“Secondly, TV audiences attach to actors and actresses,” he continues. “And I think it would be doing a disservice to the character to expect the TV audience to fall in love with this alien Harry while only seeing this person as an alien. So it definitely helped make my decision that one of the first big changes I had to make was depicting Harry as a human being most of the time. We remind the audience here and there, with reflections and stuff like that –but mostly it’s Alan doing his alien impersonation.”
Tudyk is exactly the kind of physically malleable, funny and likeable actor that an executive producer prays the casting gods will deliver unto them. But it took a while to hit upon him, Sheridan admits.
“Typically, you look [for actors] in LA. But we opened it up to London and Ireland. We tried to get some of the European actors. We looked at over 100 actors before Alan came in,” he says. “And they were all great actors.
I thought I knew who the character was, but I did not know what I was looking for until Alan came in and did it. And then I knew. These other actors came in, and they would do great but I was like, ‘They’re not quite right’, and I wouldn’t know why,” he continues. “Some were playing aliens that were a bit more robotic, and they didn’t have the humanity in them. And some weren’t playing aliens at all. They were just playing a leading man. But if they came in and were too comfortable in their skin, that takes some of the threat away, because he should be uncomfortable, like he doesn’t want to get caught.
“When Alan came in, he was playing it uncomfortable, trying to figure things out. He looks like he doesn’t fit in, but he has a natural humanity inside of him, which Alan himself has.
“He is such a good person that it really shines through that mask he puts on as an alien. And it really became what the character is now. I got very, very lucky, and I honestly don’t know what we would have done without him. I don’t know if anyone else but Alan could have pulled it off.”
PATIENCE PERSONIFIED
Alongside Harry’s strangeness, there’s plenty of other quirkiness to be found in the wintry town of Patience. An isolated burg, it’s stuffed to the gills with oddballs and weirdos, and provides the backdrop for a murder that the good doctor gets sucked into helping solve. “It’s a bunch of people who are in this small town in Colorado that’s surrounded by these mountains, and it’s almost like an island on its own,” Sheridan says of the show’s setting. “It’s people who have secrets. It’s people who have problems. It’s people who have walls up that need to come down. And I think it’s people who all feel, in one way or another, like outsiders.”
They include the surly Sheriff Mike Thompson (Corey Reynolds), the snarky barkeep and D’arcy (Alice Wetterlund), the one kid in town who can see what Harry really is. Sheridan says this eclectic group’s chemistry will have an impact on alien Harry as he’s trying to assimilate among us, and vice versa. “In the centre of it all is this alien who is – because of the nature of who he is and how different he is – slowly bringing them all together and making them better human beings themselves.”
In turn, the more he makes Patience his home, the less certain the alien will become about accomplishing his dastardly mission. Sheridan teases: “His character/emotional journey for the series, and certainly for the first
When Alan came in, he was playing it uncomfortable, trying to figure things out
season, is now that he’s changed his molecular structure into the human structure, he discovers soon after the pilot that he doesn’t just look human; for the first time, he’s actually feeling human emotions, which he never has done before.
“His people don’t live life that way. Where he’s from, they get a lot done,” Sheridan continues. “They start their day, and have things to do, and they don’t get slowed down by caring about this or that. They’re a very productive species. But when he starts feeling these emotions, he doesn’t know what to make of them. He doesn’t know what fear is, or what that means when his heart starts to race and he doesn’t know why.”
When it comes to the arc of the first season (and hopefully beyond), Sheridan says that fans of the comics should be ready for some pretty broad deviations. “It’s hard to [assess] percentages, but it feels like it’s 80% different,” Sheridan says of his Resident Alien narrative.
“I pick and choose what I can. I took the storyline from the first graphic novel, which is the death of Sam Hodges, and I’m arcing that out for the first season as a town story. And I won’t say which one, but there’s a storyline in one of the five comics that gave me an idea for the second season.”
He hopes fans of the comic will find this take on the world worthy too. Sheridan is quick to praise Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse for their creative inspiration which lies behind everything. “Obviously, this wouldn’t exist without Peter and Steve’s work – I think they’re brilliant,” he enthuses. “They created these incredible characters and I’m just trying to do whatever I can to be honest and true to their vision, just taking it from that format to this one.
“In the end, both are about an alien who is here, looking at humanity and trying to figure it out.”
Resident Alien premieres in the US on Syfy on 27 January. A UK date is still TBC.