When Alien: Covenant opens Friday, audience members will likely be thrilled to see Danny McBride piloting the film’s title colony ship. But nobody will be more thrilled than the Eastbound and Down actor himself.
“The idea that Ridley Scott was even familiar with me was pretty stunning,” said McBride in a phone call. McBride is such a huge Alien fan that seeing the Weyland-Yutani symbol on the ship console his first day on set as was like a near-religious experience. But what project of McBride’s qualified him in Scott’s mind for the latest franchise reboot?
“After Pineapple Express, Seth Rogen told me that Ridley had reached out to him and said how much he enjoyed the film,” McBride said. “So I’m not sure what he saw [of mine] that he liked, but I know he had at least seen that.”
McBride is primarily known for playing loners and losers with comically inflated egos in dark comedies like Eastbound & Down, Vice Principles, and This Is the End. But in Alien: Covenant, McBride plays a highly competent pilot outfitted with a cowboy hat—an homage to the Slim Pickens character in Dr. Strangelove—and works alongside other crew members played by Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, and Jussie Smollett.
To prepare, McBride studied pilots—“just seeing how calm they stay when they’re working,” and observing their mannerisms so “it didn’t look like I was just flipping switches the whole time.” Aside from that character research, McBride said that toggling from comedy to sci-fi was not particularly difficult.
“The kind of comedy we do in Eastbound and Vice Principals is just a few degrees away from being a straight tragedy,” McBride explained. “So weirdly, the kind of preparation was very similar because you want to just root it in reality. I had no idea what the tone of the set would be going in because in comedies, it’s really loose and lively and you laugh a lot. . . . Despite all the disgusting, horrible things that are happening on-screen, I was surprised to see how light Ridley keeps it on set. It’s pretty awesome.”
McBride shares screen time, dialogue, and even a whiskey shot with Michael Fassbender’s character (one of them, anyway), an eerily human android named Walter. And Fassbender’s commitment to his robotic performance did pose a bit of a challenge for McBride.
“When you’re acting and you’re looking into [a co-star’s] eyes, they’re giving you something back,” McBride says. “It was crazy how dialed in Fassbender was with this android performance, because you’d look at him and there’d be zero emotion, no matter what you say. He’s just always processing. It kind of spooked me out a little bit after time, honestly. I would have to look over his shoulder. Just looking at someone who just isn’t registering anything you’re saying with any emotion is crazy.”
The film, which opens in theaters Friday, also provides McBride and James Franco fans with a brief reunion of the frequent co-stars, as Franco has a cameo that provides a surprising, space-set epilogue to their previous collaborations in Pineapple Express, Your Highness, and This Is the End.
“I love James, so it was amazing to see him there,” said McBride. “We had already been shooting for a little bit, so it was good to see an old friend show up. And you’re giving him a tour around the spaceship: ‘Yeah, this is where we do this, and this is where this happens.’ It was nuts. He and I were both like, ‘Man, I hope that this [cameo] doesn’t mess people up.”
Laughing, he added, “I felt like our characters in This Is The End would really appreciate what was happening there. It was funny.”
