Out of all the cast members to join Alien: Covenant, Danny McBride came as the biggest surprise. He typically appears in comedies. So why the heck is he in the far reaches of space getting stalked by a hideous beastie? As it turns out, actors are pretty adept at you know, playing other people, so McBride's putting the comedy on the backburner to play the Covenant ship pilot. Still, he was just as shocked as the rest of the world when Ridley Scott approached him.
"When Ridley asked me to come in and read I didn't even know what movie it was for," he tells Hitfix, "and he starts talking to me about it and then starts showing me these diagrams of spaceships and I'm just thinking 'Fuck, this is Alien, he's talking to me about Alien right now'. And my next thought was: Why would he be interested in me for this, am I going to just be the comic relief in this?"
It's not unheard of for horror movies to cut the tension with a joke or two. The original Alien had a few spots of light humor as the Nostromo crew gather for dinner, and Aliens had its fair share of amusing one-liners. But it looks as if there won't be much room for laughter in Covenant.
"I got the script and I’m like this shit is dark!" he adds. "There is no comic relief in this at all. This is a dark horror movie. And that was exciting. To be able to step into something like that and to participate in a way that not relying on things I’d done before."
Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Jussie Smollett, Amy Seimetz, Callie Hernandez and Danny McBride, Alien: Covenant will open in the US on October 4, 2017 with a UK date still to be determined.
Images: Fox, HBO
