Chiwetel Ejiofor talks The Man Who Fell To Earth and these stranger-than-science-fiction times

Who doesn’t love a space alien living next door? Mork & Mindy, ALF, 3rd Rock From The Sun: They’re classics—some, admittedly, better than others—with long cultural shadows. Now, Chiwetel Ejiofor (Doctor Strange, 12 Years A Slave) visits our little blue ball in The Man Who Fell To Earth, a fast-paced sequel to the 1976 sci-fi classic starring David Bowie as spaceman Thomas Newton. (The Showtime series premiered last night, April 24.) This time, though, it’s not a sitcom like those aforementioned shows. It’s serious—like, save-the-planet serious.

In the show, co-created by Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman, Ejiofor’s character literally craters in the oil fields of New Mexico from a distant, dying planet. An extreme fish out of water, he adopts the name of Martha Plimpton’s police officer (Faraday) and sets out on a mission to find the brilliant scientist Justin Falls (Naomie Harris) and a revolutionary patent created by Newton (an older, seedier ET played by Bill Nighy).

The A.V. Club spoke to Ejiofor about finding your inner Martian, his first foray into filmmaking, and how science fiction isn’t so fictional in the age of climate change.

Chiwetel Ejiofor: There are definitely projects that make me lean in—how to tell the stories of our complicated times, through science fiction or other narratives. With The Man Who Fell To Earth, Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet are asking really big questions from the viewpoint of somebody who’s experiencing the planet in a completely novel way.

AVC: How does one play an extraterrestrial?

CE: You can only play your own alien. You can only ever find those parts of yourself that remind you of when you’ve been on the outside, isolated. We all have them. Most people lock them away and they only pop out, if you’re lucky, in a therapy session. I don’t exactly try to re-experience the first day of school, or moments when I felt outside of things or locked out emotionally. Yet in order to play an alien, you have to go to those places and sit in those feelings.

AVC: But childhood memories play a part?

CE: Certainly: childhood feelings of isolation. Or creative isolation. When you’re not on the same page as anybody. With Faraday, I was intrigued by the idea that if everything is a new experience, how do you then judge where you are? That’s such an interesting space to begin a character’s journey, learning how to physically assimilate, then how to assimilate language. Then you’re trying to understand how to psychologically assimilate. And that’s obviously where it starts to become a metaphor for human migration. My family migrated from Nigeria to the U.K., so I grew up understanding how isolating that can be, how complicated assimilation is.

AVC: Creative isolation is also central to your film directing debut, 2019’s The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind. Based on the memoir by William Kamkwamba, the story is about an African teenager who builds a wind turbine to irrigate crops. He has to convince his father so he can save his village. Did you draw on childhood experiences for that?

CE: One of the things that drew me was exactly that: somebody who feels very different to the people he’s around and what that difference means. That’s where the two projects are connected. We tend to think of that isolation as a negative, but often it is a unique vantage point from which to improve certain things. Even when we talk about migration, we often couch it in negative terms, whereas migration enriches countries in profound ways.

AVC: Like William Kamkwamba, Faraday is seeking a device that will help save his people.

CE: And us. It will help his planet, Anthia, but it feeds into helping Earth. That’s something I love: He’s sharing his experience of global disaster, but not telling us what to do.

AVC: In a recent podcast, Jenny Lumet was talking about wanting a portrayal of an Anthian different to the 1976 David Bowie movie, someone who was more “virile,” which I thought was an interesting choice of words.

CE: Obviously, Faraday and Newton are both Anthians; they have a humanoid form in common. But they are as distinct as I am to David Bowie. Bowie was absolutely iconic in the role. In every frame you can’t rip your eyes away from him. And that’s magnificent as a base point.

AVC: Newton is now played by Bill Nighy. In the first episode, when you’re in the police station and channeling Newton’s instructions, is that a Nighy impression?

CE: Well, I’ve known Bill a long time so I had a bit of fun with that. As far as him taking on the Bowie role, it takes a legend to play a legend. Bill’s the only person on the planet who could have filled those shoes—and does so brilliantly.

AVC: In the third episode, Faraday is floating in a motel pool, fully dressed, talking to Justin [Naomie Harris]. And he notes matter-of-factly that in 2030 world temperatures will rise and then “all the dominoes will fall.” Watching that, you think: This isn’t science fiction anymore.

CE: Yeah, nobody knows the future, but we understand what a trajectory will look like. It’s about how humans relate to our planet, which has offered us an extraordinary amount. Faraday comes from a place where he does not have that, to Earth, where we have an abundance of resources. And he witnesses our attitude to that.

AVC: Your character Karl Mordo is back in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Madness, out next month. Last time we saw Mordo, he was taking away Pangborn’s ability to walk and declared that the world has “too many sorcerers.” Would you agree?

CE: I do think that have witnessed the validation of Mordo’s position, that there are structures and rules, and when they’re broken, they open a Pandora’s box of problems. And so we’ll just see how that relates to everything as we move forward.

AVC: Any teasers about the movie?

CE: Can’t get into specifics, but the world of Doctor Strange expands in a really fascinating way.