Meet Victoria the sheep, Alien: Earth’s creepiest creature
“He likes the sheep,” Samuel Blenkin tells Polygon. “He thinks the sheep’s kind of cool.”
The sheep in question here is no normal mammal. It’s been corrupted by a parasitic, eyeball-shaped alien that’s hellbent on murdering its human captors. And in episode 6 of Alien: Earth, the creature’s plan begins to unfold.
For Blenkin, who plays the petulant trillionaire genius Boy Kavalier, the sheep was also an excellent scene partner — both the actual animal used on set and the animatronic model, each of which was a “creepy” experience in its own way.
“No acting required,” Blenkin jokes. “Really, it was so scary.”
After watching Alien: Earth episode 6 (“The Fly”), Polygon caught up with both Blenkin and director Ugla Hauksdóttir to break down how they brought the show’s creepiest extraterrestrial to life.
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Alien: Earth episode 6]
“No acting required”
The eyeball monster goes by many names. Fans have dubbed it everything from eyeball alien to eyeball octopus (because tentacles), while the show’s in-universe scientists refer to it as trypanohyncha ocellus, or Species 64. On the set of Alien: Earth, Ugla Hauksdóttir and the rest of the cast and crew called it the “eye midge.”
As for the sheep, the internet hasn’t landed on a nickname yet, but I’d like to suggest Victoria, which is the name of the actual animal used in some scenes.
“Victoria is an amazing actor,” Blenkin says, “best actor I’ve ever worked with.”
The Alien: Earth team used Victoria as a reference throughout the show, and also as an on-screen actor in several early scenes before the eye midge infects her. However, getting the sheep to stand still while the camera was rolling required a clever trick. Her handler would have to rub her belly repeatedly using a green glove attached to a long green pole, both of which could be edited out of the final shot.
“Victoria the sheep would know to stay still and stare into the distance,” Blenkin says. “Sometimes, that was really creepy.”
“We had animal trainers there to help us make that happen,” adds Hauksdóttir. “It’s always a challenge to work with an animal, but thankfully, with patience, she gave us the performance we were after.”
Once the sheep gets infected by the eye midge, Victoria is swapped out for an animatronic version designed to look identical, with one big difference: her alien eyeball.
“It was quite limited in movement, but it was able to do these creepy things,” Hauksdóttir says of the animatronic farm animal. “I mean, it looked creepy to begin with, as it was just standing still, and it was able to cock its head and chew very slowly and blink its eyes and do little weird things with its eyes.”
Blenkin found the robotic sheep to be particularly terrifying. “It looks so real,” he says. “It just stood there, stock still.”
“We did have an actual facehugger on set”
Of course, Victoria isn’t the only monster in Alien: Earth episode 6. This chapter of the story also features several other creatures breaking out of their cages to terrorize their captors. It all culminates in one of the franchise’s most iconic tropes: the facehugger attack. In this case, the entire scene was done with practical effects, using an animatronic alien and lots of string.
“That was a great sequence to shoot,” Hauksdóttir says. “We did have an actual facehugger on set, and it was able to move. And we used strings for when it chokes him and wraps its tail around his neck.”
The decision to rely on practical effects for this sequence as much as possible came from showrunner Noah Hawley. It’s a choice Hauksdóttir was more than happy to go along with, and one she says the entire cast was excited about, too.
“You could see the creature,” she says. “You could actually sort of fight against it. It added a lot for us to have those creatures not only be CGI, but to be there for real with us on the day we were shooting.”
The result is a gripping facehugger attack that measures up to any of the Alien movies that preceded it. But while the Xenomorph lifecycle is always a beautiful thing to behold, it’s the new monsters, like Victoria the sheep, that make Alien: Earth so much fun to watch.
Alien: Earth airs weekly on Tuesdays at 9 p.m. EDT on FX and Hulu.