Hiding Your Truth Is ‘Staggeringly Unfair’

“How did we get here?”asks the character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, in a Steve Jobs-ian scene that opens and closes the first episode of Showtime’s The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Who is he? “I am a tyrant. I am the king,” he tells the cheering audience that fills an arena, hanging on his every word. “A tech god Willy Wonka, up to my Gobstoppers in secrets,” he says. “And it’s all true. Well, the secrets part, anyway. So, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The warning is worthwhile. Film buffs and Baby Boomers know the title; For the rest of us, this is not your grandfather’s 1976 David Bowie mindbender. That movie is actually based on the 1963 Walter Tevis novel of the same name.

Showtime promotes this new series, executive produced by Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman, the co-creator of the Paramount+ streamer Star Trek: Discovery, as an “inspired continuation” of the original film and novel:

“An alien (Chiwetel Ejiofor) crashes deep into the oilfields of New Mexico with a mission: he must find the brilliant scientist Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), the one woman on earth who can help save his species. Even as he struggles to adapt to our world and to become more ‘human,’ her faith in humanity couldn’t be lower. An unlikely duo, together they discover that in order to save his world, they must first save ours.”

Alien? Wait, Ejiofor, aka “Faraday”—the “tech god Willy Wonka”—is an alien? Buckle your seatbelts! Lumet and Kurtzman explained it all in a press junket.

“It is a 45-year later sequel,” Kurtzman said. “It picks up a lot of threads that were left at the end of the [David Bowie] film. Obviously Thomas Newton, at the end of the [1976] film, is left blind and alcoholic, having failed in his mission. He’s sent for Faraday to finish what he started. There’s a lot of things in the film that will come up in episodes. The trick was to pick those threads, play with them a little bit, but stay in something that still felt very original and its own thing.”

Lumet revealed it was very intentional on their part what the character ultimately played by Naomie Harris would look like.

“The character of Justin, which was the first character that Alex and I were able to wrap ourselves around, it was imperative that she be a woman of color,” she said. “You can make the argument that women of color are the most endangered species on the planet. They’re the most vulnerable. You need that perspective to tell a true story about human beings. And every time you cast a Black person it becomes less remarkable that you cast a Black person. That’s the team that we play on.”

Harris, whose filmography includes fantasy films like Venom, Rampage and the 007 thrillers including No Time to Die, as well as the Oscar-winning Moonlight, told me she doesn’t seek out roles based on genre.

“I really don’t look at projects and think, ‘It’s a sci fi thing. Oh my gosh, I really want to be part of that.’ Or even, you know, ‘It’s a Shakespeare adaptation. I want to be part of it.’ It’s really about the quality of the writing and the characters and how grounded they are and who I’m going to be working with as well,” said Harris. “I want to constantly be stretched and have a funny experience as well while I’m doing it. And yeah, I am happy to do whatever people will give me the opportunity to be part of, basically.”

Here’s the trailer for the 2022 reimagined version of The Man Who Fell to Earth:

Ejiofor told me he watched the original before playing Faraday in this series.

“I loved it,” he said. “I love David Bowie in it especially, and I think that he’s so incredibly iconic in that role, and you can’t rip your eyes away from him in every scene in the movie. So, as a sort of guiding star of the whole project, it’s fantastic to slip into that universe in any way. And we’re both champions. Thomas Jerome Newton is represented in this show and is played by Bill Nighy, who’s another iconic actor, so it’s a legend playing a legend, really, as far as I’m concerned. And that’s amazing as well.”