The daughter of Emmy winner Kyle Chandler was a wallflower raised outside of Hollywood. Now she’s leading one of the biggest shows of the year.

Sydney Chandler opens up about Alien: Earth, her breakthrough moment, and lessons learned on the job (exclusive)

The daughter of Emmy winner Kyle Chandler was a wallflower raised outside of Hollywood. Now she's leading one of the biggest shows of the year.

By Nick Romano

Nick is an entertainment journalist based in New York, NY. If you like pugs and the occasional blurry photo of an action figure, follow him on Twitter @NickARomano.

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Published on August 12, 2025 09:30AM EDT

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Sydney Chandler for 's Comic-Con photo shoot. Credit:

- The daughter of Emmy winner Kyle Chandler talks about carving out her own place in Hollywood with her biggest role yet on one of the biggest shows.

- Sydney Chandler opens up about lessons learned on the job, including a situation involving a *Variety* cover.

- The actress, 29, looks back on the bold play that landed her the lead role of Wendy: "It was an all-or-nothing scenario."

Sydney Chandler’s biggest fear — bigger than running from a teeth-baring xenomorph on her new FX series *Alien: Earth* — is playing the popular girl in school. She’s more at home as the outsider, she tells **, typically those “who are quite observant and have a vast internal landscape that might not be seen by the other characters.”

In *Don’t Worry Darling* (2022), marking her first major film role, the 29-year-old played a small but noticeable part as Violet, one of multiple women unaware that their husbands placed them in a simulated prison of 1950s suburban domesticity. On *Pistol*, the Craig Pearce-created miniseries on British punk band the Sex Pistols, the actress played Chrissie Hynde, a founding member of rock group the Pretenders. She then played the missing daughter of a Hollywood producer with a history of drug use on Apple drama *Sugar*.

Those are far more fun for Chandler than any Regina George type, which would be her “nightmare,” she admits. “That's actually been a legitimate conversation with my agent,” she says of her no-go role, giggling as if to acknowledge how odd of an anxiety it might sound to someone else. “I don't know how to access that. I really don't. Maybe one day, but probably never. That makes my heart beat fast just thinking about it.”

'Alien: Earth' stars Babou Ceesay, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, and Sydney Chandler for EW's Comic-Con photo shoot.

Chandler knows the experience of being a loner. As a kid, she lived and breathed in her imagination. A horse girly at heart who rode since the age of 3, Chandler found herself commonly in the company of the animals in the stables as opposed to other kids her age. Books were her world, she says. “I wrote a lot. I was always reading one book about dragons or another book about the history of religion. I think I was kind of an oddball.”

The daughter of Kyle Chandler, an Emmy winner for playing Coach Taylor on the five-season teen football drama *Friday Night Lights*, she grew up outside the bubble of Los Angeles. Her life felt transient, moving from Chicago; to Topanga, Calif.; to New Zealand, while her dad shot Peter Jackson’s 2005 *King Kong* film; and then to Dripping Springs, Texas, just 20 minutes outside of Austin proper. Attending a new school felt like “creating a new identity each time,” she says, “but I also think that has somewhat helped me in the career that I am now.”

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Chandler discussed this topic recently with her sister, Sawyer, who’s 6 years her junior, adding, “I don't think my brain would work the way it does without moving around so much and having that solo time.”

With her biggest role to date on one of the biggest dramas of the entire year, solo time is harder to come by these days. *Alien: Earth*, from Noah Hawley of *Legion* and *Fargo* notoriety, is the kind of series that satiates her genre-obsessed inner child as part prequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 *Alien*, part alt-timeline that doesn’t so neatly fit into the fabric of the larger franchise. Chandler leads the cast as Wendy, a newly developed hybrid, i.e. a human consciousness placed in the body of a robot. More specifically, she has the brain of a kid who was dying from a terminal illness in a superhuman synthetic adult form.

Like Wendy, Chandler is learning to walk through life in a new kind of reality as she connects with her inner child. The first few *Alien* movies transformed Sigourney Weaver into a cultural icon of sci-fi and horror, with Noomi Rapace (*Prometheus*), Katherine Waterston (*Alien: Covenant*), and Cailee Spaeny (*Alien: Romulus*) all walking in Weaver’s footsteps with subsequent installments. Chandler joins that legacy, and it’s hard to imagine, with her impressive, nuanced performance of such a complex role, that this opportunity won’t give her a much bigger platform than she’s used to.

FX also poured a great deal of resources into the eight-episode first season (with potential for more), which primarily shot in Thailand with a production budget reportedly in the ballpark of *Shōgun*, the network’s other highly ambitious gamble that paid off with Emmy wins and ratings. It puts a lot on the shoulders of the No. 1 on the call sheet.

On the evening of Aug. 4, Chandler attempts to wrap her head around the experience over a Zoom call. She sits in a car, riding through Bangkok, her last destination on the international promo tour that included the show’s European premiere in London just before that and appearances in San Diego across Comic-Con just before that. Most of her press exchanges have played out on similar car rides. She always seems to be on the go.

Sydney Chandler as Wendy in 'Alien: Earth'.

Patrick Brown/FX

“I still feel very new to this whole industry,” she admits. Of the promo tour itself, “There is no way to prepare, is what I’ve realized,” Chandler notes. “There’s no rulebook. It’s, take it day by day. I’m still on it. I’m still figuring it out right now.”

She’s been learning a great deal about the industry as she goes. That includes a recent experience involving a *Variety* cover shoot for *Alien: Earth*. Chandler was supposed to appear on said issue of the trade magazine beside Hawley and her costar Timothy Olyphant, but, as *Variety* writer Daniel D'Addario explained in the opening of the piece, her participation fell through the morning of the shoot when her team relayed that Sydney declined the video component, which these days has become a more standard element of cover asks.

In this case, it was a on-camera game of “How well do they know each other?” with her colleagues, which she didn’t feel comfortable with. A spokesperson for the trade magazine tells EW, "*Variety* invited Sydney on our cover to celebrate her performance in *Alien: Earth*. We were clear from the start that our offer included video, and we continued to negotiate with her team through the morning of the shoot to see if she would participate.”

It's clear certain things were lost in the chain of communication. "It was really unfortunate," Chandler now reflects on that situation. "I really wanted to be there for the photo shoot, and I was ready to talk anything and everything *Alien*. I did not know at the time it was a dealbreaker, to [not] do a game and personal question thing. Again, new to this; I haven't done something like that before. I felt uncomfortable doing something like that. Unfortunately, I was uninvited from the rest of the shoot. I never meant to offend.”

Chandler brings up again the lack of a handbook to guide her through this new environment, even with a celebrity dad acting as an early support system. "It's such a nebulous industry to try and explain to people who aren't on the ground in it."

Regarding the *Variety* cover, “I'm figuring this world out,” she continues. “I'm figuring out how much of my personal self I need to give, I *want* to give, I feel comfortable giving. It's a really personal journey. So I'm learning a heck of a lot on this press tour. Once this is completed, I'll have a bit of a foundation and be able to go from there.”

Chandler is also finding her voice in Hollywood through this process, and it’s only getting stronger, which may feel foreign to her at times. The first instance Chandler recalls ever raising her voice, period — that includes as a kid — was in a college acting class where her character had to yell at another woman. “I'd never yelled before,” she remembers, “and it was like all of the noise in my mind went quiet. I found this zone.”

She’s been chasing that feeling with her craft ever since, the feeling “of being able to experience emotions fully and presently in a safe arena,” she says. “It felt powerful,” Chandler adds, but more so, it pushed her outside of her comfort zone and gave her community, something she was late to the game finding moving all the time as a kid. “Acting's been the first time I feel like I'm part of a troupe or a team," she says.

In the pre-pandemic days, her first big role was gearing up to be *Urban Legend*, a reboot of the 1998 slasher. Writer/director Colin Minihan said those plans fell apart due to a combination of “really bad timing [with] COVID,” “politics inside the studio” that involved “shuffling execs,” “what I would call terrible choices in what to green light,” and “some funky stuff with TV rights.”

Chandler acknowledges the silver lining in how that played out: “I had just started auditioning when *Urban Legend* came around. So having those months during COVID was a time for me to start auditioning, playing around with scenes, taking random monologues and memorizing them, putting them on camera for no one to see.”

Syndey Chandler as Wendy on 'Alien: Earth'.

Patrick Brown/FX

Years later, *Alien: Earth* now feels like a real breakthrough moment for Chandler, who only got the part thanks to a bold yet impulsive decision. Earlier this year, she shared a story with EW about finishing the scripts at around 2 a.m. one morning and then later that day booking a flight to meet Hawley in Canada, where he was shooting *Fargo* at the time.

“My gut just screamed at me to do so, and so I did,” she says months later. It doesn’t seem like something she would’ve done earlier in her career. Though, a thought did cross her mind as she entered the restaurant where they were to have dinner: “I remember thinking, *I'm either going to get this job or I will never ever work with this man in my entire life*. It was an all-or-nothing scenario.”

In the world Hawley created with *Alien: Earth*, it’s the year 2120 and the planet is governed by five big corporations. One is Weyland-Yutani, the company that Weaver's Ellen Ripley works for in Scott's films. The others are Lynch, Dynamic, Threshold, and Prodigy. It’s a world in which everyone is trying to crack the code to immortality. There are synthetics (human-like robots), as well as cyborgs (humans with robotic enhancements) and a game-changing breakthrough developed by Prodigy, hybrids — robots infused with human consciousness.

In a nod to Peter Pan, Chandler’s Wendy and her Lost Boys are the first of their kind, living on the private "Neverland" island of Prodigy's wunderkind CEO, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). When a Weyland-Yutani spacecraft containing a host of alien species collected from distant planets (including at least one ferocious xenomorph) crash lands in one of Prodigy’s bustling cities, the hybrids are eager to get out there.

It’s only with the benefit of hindsight, after going through the process of making the show and talking about it on the press tour, that Chandler can verbalize why she felt so connected to the role to compel her to hop on a flight to land the job.

(L to R) Jonathan Ajayi as Smee, Adarsh Gourav as Slightly, Sydney Chandler as Wendy, Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, Kit Young as Tootles, Erana James as Curly, Lily Newmark as Nibs in 'Alien: Earth'.

“It was the idea of taking on a character who is written in such a layered context,” she explains. “She's smart, she's strong, her mind is like a trap, she's very rational, but I’ve realized it also allowed me to look into my inner child a bit more and find the differences in what [Wendy's] childhood would've been like versus mine, and her personality versus mine. I really loved the idea of being able to play a character at that age who does stand up on her own two feet and does speak her truth. She's the character that I could have been if I was able to step out of my shell.”

To some degree, Chandler still hasn’t fully wrapped her head around Wendy. She’s a child, but not really. Is she more human or more synthetic? That is the ultimate question the show posits. “She is such an enigma of a character that, even towards the end of filming, would surprise me,” the actress adds.

Chandler tried different ways to find the groove of Wendy, such as taking a kids-level karate class, to understand the specific action style of the character; and watching various cartoons, which Wendy and her older brother, Hermit (Alex Lawther), a human tactical officer and medic, used to watch when they were little.

“All of it was not clicking for me until I just simplified it down,” Chandler remembers. “The arc of her story is, What is identity? I had to take her dialogue as my Bible. Whatever she says, that is the truth. I never wanted to think about playing a child, and I never did.”

Chandler never really saw the bigger picture of *Alien: Earth* — the sheer size of the production and the network machine fueling it — as she was making it. She describes the months-long shoot as “boots on the ground” where you had to focus on the task at hand. The realization only started to set in when she sat down to watch finished episodes to prepare for press interviews.

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“I was scared of letting the little sci-fi kid in me down. It's scary,” she admits. “I love *Alien* and I don't want to walk away from the show going, ‘Geez, that didn't work.’ But I sat down and I watched all of them. At the end was when that feeling hit of, one, ‘Oh my gosh! We made a show,’ and, two, ‘I've watched all of the sci-fi and I've never seen anything like this before.’”

Hawley has a multi-season plan in plans should FX green light *Alien: Earth* for more episodes. If that becomes the case, there are certain lessons Chandler is taking with her into the future. One is the safety net of her cast members. (“They won’t let you fall,” she says.) The other is something she always found hard to grasp.

“I feel like I was able to learn through playing Wendy that it's okay to hold your own, and that holding your own space is enough, and you don't have to push and you don't have to prove,” she explains. “I understand it intellectually, but it's really hard to let that idea live in my body. I think this job forced me to, because that's where Wendy took me. I really hold onto that as a personal gift this character gave me, that I would never have expected.”**

And now her dad even seems to be chasing her coattails. Just like Chandler, Kyle is now co-leading a buzzed-about sci-fi TV series, HBO's *Lanterns*, based on the space-cop Green Lanterns of DC Comics. It's a topic that comes up around the proverbial dinner table.

"We've been joking. I'm like, 'Dad, you me,'" she says, laughing. "Come on, dude. You already got *Super 8*, what are you doing?"

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