Undercover Brits: The 'Alien' Franchise

The Alien series has many originators, but a crotchety British director bears responsibility for the serene but chilling atmosphere that helped propel the slasher-in-space original to global, enduring franchise status. Ridley Scott had only made one other film when he took us onboard the USCSS Nostromo, a towing spacecraft populated by squabbling blue-collar crewmates who must confront the absolute inhumanity of outer space when the face-hugging contents of an alien egg board their ship and grows into a movie monster of such potent strangeness that it hasn’t been topped since. 

Alien is a masterclass of production design, a stunning slice of ‘70s stillness and anxiety that begs for return visits – even though no sequel, spin-off, or prequel captures the first film’s perfect alchemy, they all have something exciting to offer. Depending on your own personal canon, FX’s Alien: Earth may or may not be the first time the Xenomorph has visited Earth, but Noah Hawley’s series is the first time we’ve seen Xenomorphs on television. 

Crucially, Alien: Earth honors a 45-year-plus tradition for the series – casting British actors in leading roles and then tearing them into bloody chunks. To honor one of the most dependable franchises proving its (acid) blood is still pumping, here are ten Brits undercover in the most quintessential sci-fi horror series ever made.

(Note: Do not expect Michael Fassbender on this list; although his performance of the android David in Prometheus and its sequel are arguably the best in the entire series, we must remind you that he is Irish, and thus disqualified.)

Alex Lawther just turned 30, but he’s already given memorable performances in Star Wars, The End of the F***ing World, and Black Mirror – he also has the honor of being the only Alien: Earth cast member to appear in a Ridley Scott film (the underrated The Last Duel). In FX’s expansion of the Alien universe (which is yet another prequel, set just before the first film), Lawther plays Hermit, a human laborer who is part of the search and rescue team on a spaceship that has crashed down on Earth (carrying, you guessed it, Xenomorphic cargo). 

Hermit is the brother of Wendy (Sydney Chandler), who suffered from a rare, incurable disease that allowed her to transfer her consciousness into a synthetic body. In Earth’s first two episodes, Hermit doesn't just go toe-to-toe with the galaxy’s deadliest predator; he comes face-to-face with his sister in her new, artificial body. Alien: Earth has only just begun, but Lawther’s performance tees up the rich emotional conflict coursing through the dystopian sci-fi.

If you are making a horror movie, please note this down: audiences recognize that British people are menacing. Two decades before his avuncular turn as the aged Bilbo Baggins (but just before he played the running coach Sam Mussabini in the prestigious Oscar-winner Chariots of Fire), Ian Holm played Ash, the Alien series’ first synthetic lifeform – although he kept his android physiology a secret until the Nostromo crewmembers ripped him limb from limb in Alien’s final act. 

Holm’s Ash set the standard for the android performances that would follow – taciturn, severe, unblinking but not without an edge of wry humor. Holm’s Ash is the godfather of the Alien series’ roster of synthetics, played by actors like Lance Henriksen, Michael Fassbender, and David Jonsson – even if Jonsson’s superb turn in Alien: Romulus was overshadowed by a resurrected, de-aged facsimile of Holm (who died in 2020) turning up to spout exposition.

For a series that champions its female characters (after Ripley, just try to make an Alien film or series without a female protagonist), there’s a disappointing lack of British women throughout the series. Carmen Ejogo is Nigerian-British, an accomplished musician, and already had a couple of decades of screen acting under her belt (including playing Coretta Scott King twice) by the time she played one of the naive, ill-fated colonists in Alien: Covenant. 

Ridley Scott’s bleak sequel to Prometheus focuses on a prospective terraforming scouting mission that runs into a bitter, petty android David (Michael Fassbender) who’s been plotting the birth of the Xenomorph species. Covenant is secretly one of the best Alien movies, and Ejogo is slap bang in the middle of one of its most grisly and panic-inducing scenes.

No Brits played lead roles in the initial Alien sequel, Aliens, we’re afraid to say. (Private Tim Crowe, played by the excellently named Tip Tipping, was not a big enough part to justify a slot on this list.) Like the first two installments, David Fincher’s Alien 3 was shot at Pinewood Studios near London, and the director took advantage of the local pool of theatre and TV actors to build out an illustrious cast of Brits on a prison planet. 

Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) plays the sympathetic doctor Clemens, who acts as Ripley’s closest ally in the “Fiorina” prison and uses his sentence as a chance to atone for his past vices, which led to some very lethal negligence. Of course, because this is Alien 3, Ripley is not allowed any lasting peace and intimacy, and Clemens is killed after baring his soul to her.

When Idris Elba joined the cast of Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel that promised answers to the enigmatic Xenomorph saga (but left us with unsettling philosophical questions), his episodes of The Wire, The Office, and Luther (half of them, at least) were behind him. 

As Janek, the captain of an expedition to discover our species’ origins, Elba carries an authoritative charm, which Scott and screenwriter Damon Lindelof thoroughly undermine when alien goliaths and their special goo rip through the crew of scientists and explorers, spitting in the face of their noble mission. Janek is permitted a shred of dignity in death, sacrificing himself to thwart the menacing Engineer from escaping to Earth, but the actor would make more impact in larger fun sci-fi spectacles like Pacific Rim and Star Trek Beyond.

Yes, we’re including an entry on the Alien vs Predator films, even if they’ve been unceremoniously scrubbed from the official timeline. These junky, inelegant brawler films at least boast more practical effects and set design than any superhero team-up and versus match from the past ten years, but they still add up to a big fat nothing. 

Don’t bother with the extremely cheap sequel Requiem, as the first one, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (the only Englishman to direct an Alien movie besides Ridley Scott), gives you everything you’re looking for, including a lively performance by Trainspotting and Snowpiercer actor Ewen Bremner as Dr. Graeme Miller, a chemical engineer. The Scottish actor helps fill out a diverse, international cast of explorers and academics with stock personalities who are fated to meet grisly fates in the Predator’s arctic temple; like other Brits before him, Bremner is privileged with a facehugger-chestburster combo death.

In the nostalgia-charged back-to-basics romp Alien: Romulus, director Fede Álvarez cast the youngest cohort of actors ever assembled for an Alien film. In the film, a band of young workers sneak aboard an abandoned science vessel to loot their cryopods – part of a scheme to secure a better life among the stars – but a lurking Xenomorph has other plans.

David Jonsson played the amiable, slightly malfunctioning synthetic Andy, whose loyalty to his human sister Rain (Cailee Spaeny) causes friction with the gang when the monster antics amp up. At the BAFTA awards the next year, Jonsson was awarded the prestigious Rising Star Award (the only BAFTA with a public vote), marking him as a significant new talent following compelling performances in Rye Lane and Industry.

There are too many Brits in Alien 3 to give each their own highlight – Pete Postlethwaite! Danny Webb! – so forgive us for honing in on Paul McGann. In Alien 3, he plays Golic, a sadistic murderer shunned by the other inmates who becomes obsessed with the Xenomorph after he privately witnesses its majesty in Fiorina’s underground tunnels. 

By the time he was cast in the sequel (which had the most troubled production of any Alien film), McGann had dazzled in the scuzzy English comedy Withnail & I and was a few years away from briefly inheriting the Doctor Who role in the 1996 TV movie reboot. It’s maybe not a total surprise that a list of ten British sci-fi actors would include two people who had played the Doctor; it is admittedly very unlikely for one of them to have regenerated into the other.

As Prometheus was also shot at Pinewood Studios, it must have been an easy commute for the multiple British actors who appeared in it – including Rafe Spall, Kate Dickie, and Benedict Wong. (This is the first Alien film to shoot at Pinewood in 20 years, which might explain why there are no British actors in Alien: Resurrection.) 

Sean Harris plays Fifield, a nervy geologist who gets his helmet melted by the famous Prometheus black goo, which turns him into a mutated zombie who tears through the crew until he begs to be put out of his misery. It’s a nasty and memorable role for the actor, who would have an exciting on-screen decade in The Borgias, Southcliffe, the obscure British horror Possum, and two of the best Mission: Impossible films.

To be a British national treasure, it helps to balance out decades of serious dramatic acting (such as The Elephant Man, I, Claudius, A Man for All Seasons) with appearances in lucrative, recognizable genre fare. 

John Hurt turns up in Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Doctor Who, but before all that, he was the stammering, pale-faced crewmember Kane, who had the indignity (or maybe the honor) of being the first on-screen Xenomorph kill in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Hurt’s fragile physical acting is memorable not just because it precedes some convulsing, ribcage-shattering body horror, but because he spends a chunk of his screentime immobile on a bed, his face covered by a crab-like alien parasite doing god-knows-what to his insides. 

(*Ed Note: It also helped that he willingly reprised it for Spaceballs, in which he quotes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Bowl of Petunias, "Oh, no. Not again.")

All of the Alien films (yes, Alien vs Predator too!) are all streaming in the U.S. on Hulu or on Disney+ under the Hulu tile. Alien: Earth continues with one new episode on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on FX, followed by streaming on Hulu the next day through the end of September 2025.