The Xenomorph isn’t the only powerful being in FX’s Alien: Earth series, with the heads of five major corporations calling the shots on our planet and its neighbours. The newest of these organisations, Prodigy, is led by young founder Boy Kavalier, a bratty trillionaire with a massive ego played to perfection by Mary and George, Black Mirror, and The French Dispatch star Samuel Blenkin.
Though Blenkin told Mashable that Boy Kavalier isn’t based on anyone from real life, he said it was a wildly fun exercise to play someone who can do whatever they damn well want.
“I was so excited to play this role, because I don’t normally get to play people who have this kind of massive ego,” he said. “I tend to play young people who are pretty broken and vulnerable in some way, so the fact that Noah [Alien: Earth creator, writer, and director Noah Hawley] gave me a chance to inhabit somebody who can walk into a room and do literally whatever he wants, I just tried really hard to get on set and embody that.”
Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier in “Alien: Earth.”
Credit: FX
In Blenkin’s hands, Boy Kavalier intentionally uses disrespectful body language and behaviour as a power play. He refuses to wear shoes as he wanders around his secret Neverland facility, helming a complex and dangerous science project. He puts said bare feet up on desks while pushing his staff’s ethical boundaries, takes an extremely important business call with rival corporation Weyland-Yutani in bed (holding the tablet with his feet), and generally throws his authority around with the click of his fingers.
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“That feeling of freedom and collaboration meant that I could go on set and say, ‘Well, yeah, you know what? I think I will hold it with my feet.’ But that was not planned,” says Blenkin. “There were so many moments that weren’t planned that I just was cheeky and asked. And that feeling of freedom and collaboration only comes from being on a really generous set.”
“That feeling of freedom and collaboration meant that I could go on set and say, ‘Well, yeah, you know what? I think I will hold it with my feet.'”
When we first meet the prodigious leader, Boy Kavalier is helming the company’s hybrid project, one that transfers the consciousness of terminally ill children into synthetic bodies. We see the character become a kind of Peter Pan figure, naming his facility Neverland, developing his hybrid troupe of “Lost Boys” led by Wendy (Sydney Chandler), and reading J.M. Barrie’s story to them each night. Blenkin said he worked with costumer designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb to craft playsuits for Boy Kavalier to complete the show’s Peter Pan theme: “Originally we were almost going to go for pyjamas, going full Peter Pan vibes, and we came up with these brilliant playsuits.”
Exactly what drives Boy Kavalier will be unravelled over the course of Alien: Earth. We get a small clue in episode 2, when he describes his need to win the “intelligence race.” “People always think it’s about money with trillionaires. Or ego. You know what I really want? I want to talk to somebody smarter than me,” he says in a scene, munching away at an apple. “At the very least my hope is that by giving Wendy a supercomputer for a brain and training by the best geniuses money can buy, I’ll finally be able to have an interesting fucking conversation.”
You can watch Mashable’s interview with Blenkin, as well as Hawley’s insight into the opening scene of Alien: Earth, below:
