This story contains spoilers for Alien: Earth, up to and including episode seven.
Timothy Olyphant knows he's hit the "sweet spot" of celebrity. He gets to be a leading man and work with some of the best actors and filmmakers in the business, but he also can go completely unnoticed at his local coffee shop.
"I'm trying not to ruin it," he says of his status. "I mean, I had to give the lady my name for the order -- and I come here all the time! [Laughs.] So she's offended me twice."
In the barista's defense, Olyphant isn't currently sporting the bleached hair that played a major part in his transformation into Kirsh, the synthetic mentor on FX's Alien: Earth. And yet, the three-time Emmy nominee has been almost impossible to miss over the last 25 years, fronting iconic series like Deadwood and Justified, while also giving memorable scene-stealing performances in everything from The Office to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, as well as the recent Apple TV+ hit comedy Stick.
Creator Noah Hawley's entry into the world of Alien allowed Olyphant to step outside of the rugged-lawman roles he's known for and give him something he'd been seeking: the risk of failure. "It's been gratifying to hear people responding well to the work," he says, "because it felt like it was one step away from being a big mistake."
Set two years before the events of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien film, Earth brings the Xenomorph and other species to humanity's home turf for the first time, launching a war between dueling companies in the process. As Prodigy's chief scientist, synthetic Kirsh operates under the orders of CEO Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who has created the "Lost Boys," a group of terminally ill children whose human consciousness were transferred into synthetic bodies. Kirsh takes the Lost Boys under his wing, but the arrival of the aliens at Prodigy's research island sets off a chain of events that has the kids suddenly thinking for themselves.