Katee Sackhoff & Alan Tudyk on What Resident Alien Can "Pull Off" Better Than Other Shows
The genre favorites talk shop and Resident Alien on Katee Sackhoff's weekly podcast.
Genre favorites, former co-stars in 2014’s Tell, and SYFY Original series “cousins” Katee Sackhoff and Alan Tudyk — she starred in Battlestar Galactica and he is our Harry Vanderspeigle on Resident Alien — reunited this week for her podcast, The Sackhoff Show.
In the almost 90-minute chat between the actors, Sackhoff and Tudyk discussed his incredible resume of genre roles and voice characters, including his freshly Emmy-nominated return as droid K-2SO in Andor and his current four-season stint anchoring Resident Alien.
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"I have the lucky job of playing the alien, so I get to do the crazier things,” Tudyk told Sackhoff about his weekly antics playing an alien navigating life with the humans of Patience, Colorado, and their messy emotions.
Sackhoff asked him about the boundaries of his comedic freedom portraying Harry in the series and Tudyk explained: "Whenever there’s a scene that I have ideas about...the pushback can’t be, 'He can’t do that…' because he is an alien. And I love things like this, that can be funny and sad at the same time. Those are my favorite things and it’s really hard to make them."
Alan Tudyk on the alchemy of Resident Alien and the freedom to be "dumb"
Asked by Sackhoff about how they calibrate the Resident Alien mix of funny and serious, Tudyk said it was a partnership with creator Chris Sheridan.
"I’ve read a lot of things that try to do it and they don’t pull it off because you can go too silly very easily, or just so serious [that it] isn’t funny,” the actor explained. "It’s really up to the writing. I have more writing control of my scenes than of other things I’ve been a part of.
"They'll get a full airing,” he said of his conversations with the writing team. "I’ve even been able to write some scenes in the show. It’s the world that Chris Sheridan made that somehow supports it. I don't know how he did it! And I luckily don’t have to do straight-up serious stuff all the time; that’s the other actors."
When asked about some of his favorite scenes, Tudyk said, chuckling: "It’s so stupid and so dumb. Even stuff that doesn’t make sense, they let me put in.”
He cited a Season 3 episode featuring improv expert Edi Patterson, who plays Harry's recurring Blue Avian girlfriend, Heather.
“[Harry] used to have this hat from this planet where they make this material that’s so strong, you can’t rip it. So, I was like, ‘Can we have a jingle?’ It wouldn’t make any sense they would have a jingle in English but they let us do it,” he said, laughing.
Tudyk continued that he was also partial to a poem they let him write about Heather's "cloaca and boners” that made it into the final cut. And the episode where he prompted Patterson to regurgitate bird seed into his mouth.
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"When she spit into my mouth, I laughed,” he told Sackhoff of a rare break for him. "I like to think I don’t break but I saw the outtake of it, and it’s so funny. I was so happy, I felt like I was high. I was dizzy because it was so ridiculous to me. I was experiencing joy because you don’t get to play on that level often, or ever. And they were filming it to put on TV. It was thrilling."
How to watch Resident Alien
New episodes of Resident Alien premiere on USA Network and SYFY every Friday in a new time slot: 10 p.m. ET, with each episode available to stream on Peacock a week after air. The first three seasons are now available to watch right here!
