TV
FX’s “Alien” Television Series Adds to Growing Cast
The cast for FX’s “Alien” series continues to grow, with Deadline reporting that actor Moe Bar-El (The Peripheral) joins in recurring capacity. More interestingly, the announcement gives a bit more insight to the many of the characters in the series.
The series is “set in a time period before Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley and is the first story in the franchise that takes place on Earth, roughly 70 years in the future.” FX originally noted, “Expect a scary thrill ride set not too far in the future here on Earth.”
Bar-El joins previously announced cast members Babou Ceesay (“Guerrilla,” “Damilola”), Jonathan Ajayi (“Wonder Woman 1984,” “Noughts and Crosses”), Erana James (“Uproar,” “The Wilds”), Lily Newmark (“Pin Cushion,” “Sex Education”), Diêm Camille (“Washington Black,” “Alex Rider 3”), and Adrian Edmondson (“War & Peace,” “A Spy Among Friends”), Timothy Olyphant (“Fargo”), David Rysdahl (“Fargo”), Essie Davis (The Babadook), Alex Lawther (The End of the F*cking World), Samuel Blenkin (“Black Mirror”), and Adarsh Gourav (The White Tiger).
While character details for Bar-El remain under wraps, Sydney Chandler stars in FX’s “Alien” as Wendy, said to be “a hybrid, a meta-human who has the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult.”
It’s also worth noting that Deadline reveals that Olyphant may be playing “Kirsh, a synth who acts as a mentor and trainer for Wendy.”
FX’s “Alien” series is expected sometime in 2025. Production initially began just prior to the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike and is scheduled to resume this month in Thailand. In other words, expect the cast to continue to grow as production resumes, along with more details that could give insight on the horror that’s potentially in store.
Creator Noah Hawley‘s take on the Alien franchise has been described as both an “extension and reinvention” of the films that have come before it, with Ellen Ripley not involved.
Ridley Scott is on board as producer.
Published in 2019, Stephen King‘s novel The Institute is getting a TV series adaptation from MGM+, with Deadline reporting today that the project has been given a series order.
Ben Barnes (Shadow and Bone) and Mary-Louise Parker (Weeds) will star.
The Institute comes from director/executive producer Jack Bender (Lost, Mr. Mercedes), writer/executive producer Benjamin Cavell (Justified, The Stand) and MGM+ Studios.
In the eight-episode series, “When 12-year-old genius Luke Ellis is kidnapped, he awakens at The Institute, a facility full of children who all got there the same way he did, and who are all possessed of unusual abilities. In a nearby town, haunted former police officer Tim Jamieson (Barnes) has come looking to start a new life, but the peace and quiet won’t last, as his story and Luke’s are destined to collide.” The website notes that Parker will play “Ms. Sigsby, the charming but iron-willed director of the Institute and a true believer in its awful mission.”
“I’m delighted and excited at the prospect of The Institute, with its high-intensity suspense, being filmed as a series,” King said. “The combination of Jack Bender and Ben Cavell guarantees that the results will be terrific.”
“We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work again with Stephen King. And The Institute, based on his critically acclaimed novel, is an exciting addition to the MGM+ original series slate,” said Michael Wright, head of MGM+. “There is no creative team I would trust more to bring the book to life than Jack and Ben, whose creative vision and love of Mr. King’s voice, will bring this thought-provoking and gut-wrenching story to life, in the engaging, cinematic, and thrilling style MGM+ viewers expect.”
Here’s the novel’s full synopsis, via Amazon:
As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.
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