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When a director arrives at a filming location, they have a lot of important tasks before the real work can begin. Department heads to consult. Actors to be prep. Schedules to lock. When Noah Hawley got to Bangkok to direct the first episode of Alien: Earth, he immediately had to have some suits made.
“One of the first things I did upon landing was go to a tailor and work up, not a full wardrobe, but a way, through linen and cotton, to try to manage the heat, in a way that was the most stylish and comfortable,” explains Hawley, 58, the Emmy-winning creator of Fargo and Legion.
Most TV showrunners would throw on a T-shirt and cargo shorts to accomplish that goal in temperatures that were upwards of 118 degrees. But Noah Hawley is not most showrunners. Hart Hanson, who gave Hawley his first regular TV job, writing for the Fox crime drama Bones, remembers thinking on the day they met, “He’s too well-dressed to be a writer.” He doesn’t recall ever seeing Hawley in jeans or a polo shirt.
The bespoke wardrobe serves two purposes. One is, Hawley believes in dressing for the part when that part involves leadership. “We can get in trouble as artists who are also managers when we don’t understand the power of symbols,” he says. “The boss looks like the boss. No good comes from ‘I’m just like you.’”
The other purpose speaks more to his artist side. “He’s got an aesthetic point of view on the world,” says Hanson. “That’s the director part of him.” Jon Hamm, who’s worked with Hawley on Legion, Fargo, and Hawley’s film Lucy in the Sky, notes that when Hawley was in Calgary for a long winter Fargo shoot, he lived in a “kickass” vintage Airstream. “He’s thought about how he is perceived, and how that is going to look,” Hamm says. “That’s what you want: somebody who thinks about it. They don’t happen from happenstance.”
Very little in a Noah Hawley production is a result of happenstance. He describes the work he does as “artisanal on some level. Not to be obnoxious about it, but it is. You have to do it by hand, and every element of it has to be managed.” That approach has given Hawley a paradoxical niche as a storyteller who specializes in adapting other people’s material —often from big franchises, or properties that would seem to defy adaptation —in ways that feel surprising and somehow original.
First, there was Fargo, which for five seasons across the past decade has managed to feel true to the spirit of the dark, comic crime masterpiece by the Coen brothers —among the most idiosyncratic of modern filmmakers —without playing as a shameless copy. Then there was Legion, an X-Men spinoff about the mentally ill son of Professor X, which is among the strangest dramas ever put on TV. Now, he’s running Alien: Earth (Aug. 12 on Hulu), which is part of a more flexible franchise that in the past has been brought to life by distinct directors including Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and David Fincher.
It’s a curious role Hawley has carved for himself, especially since his writing career began in books, where he has mostly written non-genre fiction. “I pride myself on originality, so it’s a fascinating thing to have this niche reinventing classic films,” he says in the Austin office of his production company, 26 Keys, leaning on a pillow embroidered with the names of Fargo Season Five characters. “But so far, I’ve been allowed to do it, as a real act of reinvention. I just try to figure out what are the feelings that that movie creates in me, and how do I create those same feelings for an audience by telling you a completely different story?”
HAWLEY IS BASED in Austin — he and his wife bought a house here back in 2008 and split time between Texas and L.A. before moving full-time during the pandemic. But his story begins in New York, where he and his twin brother Alexi were raised by their businessman father, Tom, and their mother, Louise Armstrong, a feminist activist and nonfiction author best known for her 1978 book Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speak-Out on Incest. As a younger man, Tom had studied acting in London, and brought back record albums from the acclaimed Peter Sellers-led Fifties radio comedy The Goon Show, which Noah and Alexi would listen to on repeat and act out together. Then they got hooked on the radio version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which continues to inform Hawley’s sensibility.
Still, as young men, the brothers’ early goal wasn’t to join the family business as writers (their maternal grandmother was a playwright), but to become rock stars. They played together in an alt-rock band, Base Nation, with Noah working a day job as a paralegal for New York’s Legal Aid Society. But after six years, he decided it was time for a change in location and career, and some distance from Alexi.
“We were in a band together in New York and we went to the same college,” Hawley says of his brother. At a certain point, he explains, he wanted to try flying solo. “There was a moment where I got on a plane and I moved to San Francisco and I was like, ‘No, not you. I’m going to go do this thing.’”
In San Francisco, Hawley began writing fiction, publishing his first book, A Conspiracy of Tall Men, in 1998. It was optioned for a movie that wasn’t made, and when his second novel sold poorly, he began considering another job shift to writing screenplays. Around this time, Hawley tagged along with his friend, the author and journalist Po Bronson, to a meeting with Hanson, who came away from the conversation eager to read A Conspiracy, and then to hire Hawley as a writer on Bones.
“He was quiet,” says Hanson, “but I felt like he was memorizing every book on my shelf, and looking at my face, and judging my shoes. He has his own gravitational field. It’s a form of charisma. But he was very likable, very funny, and he let Po do the talking. And that is something about Noah: He is perfectly happy to let other people do the talking.”
Though Hanson knew the “goofy” tone and procedural structure of Bones weren’t to Hawley’s taste, he promised to teach Hawley how to produce a TV show in exchange for Hawley applying the best of his imagination for as long as he had the job. Hawley stuck around for three seasons and kept surprising Hanson with what he could do with the most tired clichés. “I fuckin’ hate serial killer stories,” Hanson says, but when Fox pressured them to do one, “Noah stepped up to [write] Howard Epps, our first serial killer, and he made me like it.”
Hawley eventually graduated to making his own series, starting with 2009’s The Unusuals, a quirky, short-lived ABC drama about a squad of eccentric NYPD detectives, led by a pre-blockbuster Jeremy Renner. By that point, Alexi had also shown an interest in working in TV, and Noah hired him as a writer. It didn’t go well.
“You know how they say don’t hire family?” Noah says. “He made a lot of really great contributions to it, but I think it was confusing for the rest of the staff. It was like, ‘Well, what is his authority in this?’ And his sensibility and my sensibility are not the same.”
“I remember there being some unhappiness on both parts —particularly on Alexi’s,” says Bob DeLaurentis, a TV veteran who has worked with Noah on multiple series, including The Unusuals, Fargo, and now Alien: Earth. “I don’t think they had ever worked together. And to make matters worse, while Alexi had real skills to bring to that show, they weren’t necessarily in the service of the kind of show that Noah wanted to make. If I can be really blunt and simplistic about it, Alexi was much more of a legacy network guy. At the end of the show, I told him that I thought he had a great career, if he could funnel his work in that direction.” (Alexi, who declined to comment for this story, went on to create ABC’s long-running cop show The Rookie and the Netflix spy drama The Recruit.)
Hawley has written about brothers with difficult relationships, including in his novel The Punch, and the third season of Fargo, where Ewan McGregor played two (non-twin) brothers. He says none of those stories are inspired by him and Alexi, but acknowledges, “the twin relationship is a sibling-on-steroid relationship. Because it’s not just that you share the same family and you grew up in the same house, it’s that you hit the same milestones at the same time. We just have a different approach to life, I think.”
Hawley’s second ABC drama, 2010’s My Generation (a faux docuseries about what happened to members of the same high school class 10 years after graduation), was also short-lived, but it introduced him to producer Warren Littlefield, who later hired him to write Fargo. A more straightforward adaptation of the film was in development at NBC in the Nineties, when Littlefield was the network’s president of entertainment, but he didn’t think it worked. (A pilot was eventually shot for CBS, with a young Edie Falco as Marge Gunderson; it never went to series.) With this version, though, FX executive Nick Grad gave Littlefield a suggestion that unlocked everything: “I don’t know if you need Marge to do Fargo.” When Littlefield conveyed this to Hawley, he says Noah replied, “So let me get this straight: all new characters, all new story. Fargo: a state of mind.”
Though everyone they talked to told Hawley and Littlefield the idea sounded like a no-win scenario, Hawley was able to combine the Coen brothers’ sensibility with his own, and to mix and match elements of that film with tributes to the rest of their catalog (Miller’s Crossing, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There), crafting something that converted even the most hardened skeptics.
“There’s always a respect that he brings to the original material,” says Littlefield. “There’s a fandom, but also a respect for that initial vision. And then he makes a much larger leap, and says, ‘How do I make it my own? How do I find a path that is a place where I want to live and I want to go?’ Time and again, he’s been able to achieve that.”
(The Coens have never been directly involved with the series. Hawley says he would have “an awkward lunch or an awkward breakfast” with them before beginning each of the first three seasons, “and Joel would be like, ‘You’re still making that thing?’ I think the last communication I had, I emailed Joel and said, ‘I hear you need a new pool, so I’m going to make another season of Fargo.’”)
Throughout the run of Fargo, Hawley has pitched ideas that would seem to have no business in a crime show, like repeated UFO appearances in the second season. Somehow, in context, they make sense. “We were doubters about how this was going to work,” FX executive Gina Balian says of the flying saucer. “But that’s the fun of these jobs.”
An episode of the fifth season was presented as a nature documentary narrated by Season Four alum Jason Schwartzman, but Hawley says he added the whimsical touch only because he feared the hour, in which Juno Temple’s character is institutionalized, would otherwise feel sadder than he wanted. Inevitably, each flourish in a Hawley show will turn out to have some kind of thematic or emotional point, rather than being style for its own sake. When Billy Bob Thornton’s hit man character attacks a mob outfit in the first season, the entire massacre is shot from outside the building, with only fleeting glimpses of the violence; Hawley felt it was the best way to avoid things becoming either too silly or too gory for the series’ delicate tone.
“The single most difficult thing about working with Noah,” says DeLaurentis, “is he’s got so much going on in his head, and you want to bring it all out. He thinks in unexpected ways.”
With Legion, things grew so unexpected and abstract that Hawley’s longtime editor, Regis Kimble, says he took to recording all of their conversations, “just because some of the ideas can get so far out there that I need to be able to go word-for-word to keep up.” At various points, the show featured musical numbers, robots played by actresses with mustaches, and a character who lived inside a giant ice cube on the astral plane. Much of this was meticulously planned in advance, but some of the show’s most memorably weird moments were the result of Hawley’s gift for adjusting on the fly. He was unhappy with the performances the director of the first season’s penultimate episode got from some of his actors, in a sequence where the monstrosity of Aubrey Plaza’s character is fully revealed. Rather than insist on an expensive reshoot, Hawley realized that Kimble could help him transform it into a black-and-white silent movie, scored with a version of Ravel’s Boléro, where the exaggerated acting would feel more at home.
“That was one of those shock-and-awe moments of someone coming up with an approach to a problem,” says Kimble, “where it emotionally grounded an event that, if it had played in a standard way, would have been off the page and madness. It was taking hay and spinning it into gold.”
HAWLEY BEGAN DIRECTING in the second Fargo season, and has grown more confident and strange as a filmmaker as the years have gone on. When he finally got a shot at directing his first feature, though, it turned out to be too strange for his studio bosses.
The 2019 film Lucy in the Sky was based on the true story of astronaut Lisa Nowak, who pled guilty to felony burglary and misdemeanor battery charges after she drove across the country — wearing a space-grade “absorbency” undergarment, according to a police report, and carting a hammer, knife, and latex gloves, among other items — and pepper-sprayed a woman who was dating a fellow astronaut with whom Novak had had an affair. Before Hawley came on board, he says, Lucy was intended as an I, Tonya-esque dark comedy for Reese Witherspoon “about a female astronaut that wears a diaper. That’s not a tone of voice I’m really interested in.” He wanted, instead, to “give [Nowak her] dignity back.”
“This astronaut, whether she wore a diaper to drive cross-country or not, she’s not a joke,” Hawley explains. “She was someone going through a profound mental health crisis, and I thought it’s a better human exercise to try to understand why she did that than to make fun of her doing it.”
He began turning it into a film built more on magic realism, as an attempt to demonstrate how going to space might radically alter the way an astronaut (now played by Natalie Portman) feels about life on Earth. Hawley says the studio read every draft of his version and knew what he was doing. “I delivered my cut of this magic realism astronaut movie, and the studio for whatever reason thought they were going to watch I, Tonya. I realized, ‘I don’t know how, but I made a different movie than they thought I was making.’” An attempt to recut it to match the studio’s vision ultimately left no one happy, and sent Hawley back to TV.
Hawley has a glass-half-full view of the experience. “With the feature business, because they don’t have to make a certain number of movies a year, you spend a lot more time not making movies,” he says. “Because television has an engine to it, you spend a lot more time making television than not making it. It feels like a more efficient place to tell stories.”
Now, with Alien: Earth, Hawley is making a TV show on the scale of a feature. He considers the first two Alien films among the best science fiction movies ever made, with Alien also doubling as the best horror movie and Aliens as the best action movie. To achieve his goal of recreating the feelings those films produce without repeating the same beats, he went down two intertwined paths for a story set at roughly the same time as Alien.
His favorite part of that first film was the reveal that Ian Holm’s Ash was secretly an android. So, he leaned into that with a story about a tech mogul devising a way to put human minds into synthetic bodies, starting with a group of gravely ill children —led by Sydney Chandler’s Wendy —who are given artificial, indestructible, potentially immortal new forms. And because Hawley fears the audience has become too used to the classic Alien xenomorph and its many ways of killing people, he added a variety of new extraterrestrial monsters that have been brought to Earth by another crew working for supercorporation Weyland-Yutani.
“The story is not just this evolutionary monster, who’s reminding us that we’re food,” Hawley says, “but it’s also the A.I. future that’s trying to kill us. So we’re trapped between the past and the future, and there’s nowhere to go.”
It’s all in service of taking ideas that had only been used to fuel close-ended films and turn them into something that can work as an ongoing TV series. “Imagine,” Hawley says, “if there were five movies about the White Walkers, and I went and made Game of Thrones.”
The Alien: Earth shoot could be punishing. Ever exacting, Hawley took to slapping food out of the hand of his assistant director, just to prevent him from eating something that might disagree with his digestive system and sideline him from work. The proceedings were also interrupted by the combined writers and actors strikes of 2023.
That’s not to say there was chaos on set, but there was, occasionally, confusion. Hawley is an understated personality with a dry sense of humor, a soft-spoken delivery (“I don’t remember him ever raising his voice,” says DeLaurentis),and a tendency to speak only when necessary. When Sydney Chandler began filming, she was thrown when Hawley remained silent after each take. She asked if he felt she was doing a bad job. “He said, ‘No, you’re doing exactly what you need,’” Chandler recalls. “‘I don’t want to come in and say good job. I want to keep you in that moment. If you hear silence from me, that means keep going.’ Once I got that, I thought, ‘OK, I’m on the same playing field as you. Let’s go.’”
Her co-star, Timothy Olyphant, who also appeared in the fourth season of Fargo, is an actor who’s not shy about voicing opinions. He says he approached Hawley on the Alien: Earth set with some questions and notes. “I yapped for what seemed like a few minutes,” he says, “and when I finished, I said, ‘Are we speaking the same language?’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Challenge accepted.’ One of my favorite responses I’ve ever heard from a writer. And that was the end of our conversation until he handed me back new pages. And needless to say, they were great —better than anything I was thinking of.”
Like the Fargo UFO, the idea of children in adult bodies was one that many of Hawley’s colleagues needed a while to adjust to, but, he says, “after 20 years of doing this, I get excited at the risk. The idea that it could go horribly? That is an exciting idea for me — not necessarily for everybody.”
Eventually, people recognize that, as Chandler puts it, “It all makes sense in his brain, and you trust that.”
Alien: Earth also adds a new title to Hawley’s multihyphenate resume: actor. When we get brief glimpses of Wendy as a baby with her older brother Hermit (Alex Lawther), Hawley plays their father. He did it not out of vanity, but because the young Hermit is played by Hawley’s son, Lev, who asked if he could be in one of his dad’s shows. It seemed easier to get a natural performance out of Lev if his real dad were on the floor with him playing his fictional dad. But it had an added benefit for the biggest project of Hawley’s career.
“It was very meaningful for me,” he says. “I joked about artisanal earlier, but I make these things personally, and it felt meaningful to put myself in it, with my son, and say, ‘This is a personal document for me. It’s not just a crass act of commercialism.’”
