FX’s Alien: Earth Series Won’t Use Any CG For The Xenomorph

When FX’s Alien: Earth premieres on August 12, longtime fans may find themselves holding their breath, waiting to see the Xenomorph for the first time. When they do, they may be delighted to find the iconic creature was brought to life using only practical effects, the show’s director of photography, Dana Gonzales, told GameSpot during a roundtable discussion.

“It’s 100% real,” he said, referring to how the team approached bringing the Xenomorph to life without the use of computer-generated effects. “Even in Aliens, I think there’s a lot of CG, and we’re not doing any CG Xenomorph.”

It’s not just the Xenomorph that’ll be brought to life with practical tools. As Gonzales told the group, “The Facehuggers we have, they’re all real.”

“We have many Facehuggers that do different things,” he said, referring to some of the models I saw during a studio visit that included some with animatronic parts and others that were just meant to be prosthetic. “The fact that Wētā [Workshop] built these characters that do several things really well, [it means] we can see them longer–like even the eggs are quite sophisticated.”

The starring threat in Alien: Earth will feel real thanks to practical effects.

Gonzales also revealed that Alien: Earth will feature much more Xenomorph action than any of the movies that have come before it. I asked him how the team expects to keep those scenes intense, given the early films especially relied on the tension of the creature being off-screen or rarely shown.

“I think we designed something that is very photographable and scary and detailed,” he said. “And I don’t know if some of the older movies had some of the bigger stunt techniques that we have now with the wire work, and the fact that we can kind of fly the Xeno around and stuff like that. So it’s not so much just coming out and scaring you [like a] jump scare. It’s literally flying through the air. It’s chasing you. So there’s a lot that supports the fact that you see it. And I don’t know that those films have that.”

For more on the series, here’s what the showrunner, Noah Hawley, had to say about the franchise’s past efforts.