Alien: Earth dared to make Xenomorphs talk — Inside Sydney Chandler’s creation of a terrifying new alien language

Alien: Earth dared to do something no other chapter in the franchise had fully embraced: it let the Xenomorphs speak. Not just hiss, but communicate. At the center of this leap is Wendy, played by Sydney Chandler, the synth-with-a-human-consciousness who learns to answer the aliens.

Alongside her, sound lead and designer Lee Gilmore turned what started as one vague line in the script into a fully realized, living sonic world. The result reshapes how the franchise thinks about its monsters.

Turning a single line into an entire system

When Chandler first opened the script and read the line

“Wendy opens her mouth and speaks to aliens,”

she felt the weight of inventing something new.

“It was quite daunting, because what does that look like?” she said.

There was no hired linguist the way Avatar had Paul R. Frommer to build Na’vi. The production wanted something raw and intuitive.

Gilmore remembers early talks with showrunner Noah Hawley about the “Wendy echoes,” the interior sounds Wendy perceives when the Xenomorphs first reach her.

“One idea we kept coming back to was ASMR,” he said. “We wanted it to tickle your eardrums and almost be painful at times.”

They also agreed the creatures’ biology could not be ignored. These were insectoid predators, not humanoid throats forming syllables.

The insect world as inspiration

Chandler’s preparation started long before cameras rolled.

“We have a lot of cicadas out here, so I left my phone outside for an hour at nighttime and just recorded the sounds of the cicadas and crickets,” she recalled. “There’s a melody to the language of insects, which I felt very much coalesces with the sounds of the aliens.”

She spent hours experimenting with her own body: rolling her Rs, constricting her throat, and alternating quick inhales and exhales until she could produce something eerie but controlled.

Gilmore followed a similar instinct.

“We really focused on chittery, insect-type sounds,” he said. He slowed and sped recordings of crickets and frogs, layering them until they felt alive.

His past work on Alien: Romulus gave him a mental library, but he refused to recycle it.

“Simply reusing Romulus sounds would have felt cheap,” he explained. “Noah really wanted to make this his own thing.”

Building an emotional vocabulary

From the start, the goal was not a formal dictionary but a palette of feelings. Gilmore described it as

“three different things going on: the sounds Wendy hears, the sounds she makes when she speaks back, and the Xenos vocalizing themselves.”

Each needed to feel distinct yet connected. Once the palette was set, the team shaped it into moods such as confusion, warning, rage, or the disarming softness of a newborn creature.

Chandler also shaped the physical performance.

“I would open my mouth a little bit wider and the sound would heighten or bring it down lower,” she said. “I created different layers to the communication of something to calm, something to heighten.”

She performed live on set so other actors could respond. In post-production ADR she added breath and tiny trills to keep it physical rather than mechanical.

Respecting the predator

For Chandler, the Xenomorph was never meant to feel tamed.

“This isn’t a puppy dog. This is a lion that can hurt you,” she said.

Scenes where Wendy protects her brother Joe demanded a fragile balance. She reaches out, but fear never disappears. Gilmore mirrored that restraint in sound design.

“Less is more with this universe,” he explained. “It’s really cool when you don’t spoon-feed your audience too much, and they fill in the blanks with their own imagination.”

The finished result in Alien: Earth did not belong to one creator. Hawley insisted on originality. Gilmore engineered the sonic world. Chandler gave the language physicality and cadence. On-set creature performers and ADR mixers added their touches.

“Out of all the sounds in the show, the whole Xeno language was the one thing almost everyone hammered on a little bit,” Gilmore said. “There wasn’t just one person who could say, well, it’s what I came up with.”

What this changes for Alien: Earth and beyond

By turning a vague stage note into a full system of clicks, trills and breath, the team did not just give Wendy a tool. They reframed the Xenomorph itself. For the first time the creature can answer back. Chandler felt that power shift as she performed.

“All of the Xenos, there’s a level of it’s like a mirror,” she said. “She’s seeing something that is alone and alien to its landscape, just like her… either one could kill the other if they got into it, but they’re not, so they’re working together.”

That possibility changes the stakes of the franchise. The Xenomorph is still an apex predator, still terrifying, but now it is not mute. It can meet a human mind halfway. It can recognize, maybe even negotiate.

Alien: Earth does not make the monsters less frightening. It makes them more dangerous by giving them intent.

A new kind of horror for the Alien saga

What Chandler and Gilmore created in Alien: Earth matters because it redefines the relationship between viewer and creature. The Xenomorph was always unknowable, a nightmare without language. Now it is capable of expressing desire and rage in ways we can almost parse. Chandler summed up the risk:

“I wanted to make sure that you feel a hesitancy on her end… this isn’t domesticated in any way.”

Gilmore echoed that caution:

“Once you add in that breath element, it really adds a layer of believability to it, even when it comes to the Xeno vocals themselves.”

The franchise built its fear on silence. Alien: Earth lets that silence break. The moment the creature speaks back, the hunt turns into a conversation, and conversation can be far more dangerous than pure instinct. The show does not tame the beast. It shows a predator smart enough to talk and a "human" brave enough to respond. That is a new kind of terror the series has never unleashed before.

The sound that could change a universe

There is also a long-term ripple effect here. Gilmore noted that

“once we started experimenting with those ideas… we realized the audience would hear this and feel something shift.”

Viewers are now aware that the Xenomorph can hold more than primal drive. Alien: Earth showed that it can adapt, strategize, and perhaps evolve beyond the drones we thought we knew. Chandler sees that as both thrilling and terrifying:

“You don’t know if it respects you or if it’s about to kill you. And that’s what keeps the edge alive.”

By breaking the silence, Alien: Earth planted the seed for an Alien future where terror is not only about survival but about understanding something that may be thinking back. If this creature can speak, it can also plan. And if it can plan, the nightmare just became smarter.