Alan Tudyk is everywhere — you just haven’t seen his face much.
Since his starring run on Firefly and the spin-off movie Serenity, he’s thrown himself into voice acting, recently reprising his Rogue One role as the sassy droid K-2SO on Andor, and playing a different robot opposite Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown in The Electric State. He’ll be playing yet another robot in James Gunn’s Superman, continuing a long record of providing voices for DC Comics adaptations, including Harley Quinn, Creature Commandos, and Young Justice. His credits also include numerous Disney animated films, including a stint as Moana’s dim-witted pet rooster Heihei and King Candy in Wreck-It Ralph.
But Tudyk has been center stage — and in full live action — since 2021 on Syfy’s funny, sweet series Resident Alien, which returns for season 4 on Friday. And this time around, he’s given himself a big challenge: going behind the camera to direct himself.
On Resident Alien, Tudyk plays an alien invader masquerading as Harry Vanderspeigle, a doctor in the small town of Patience, Colorado. Harry was so charmed by the humans he met, he decided to abandon his invasion mission and instead fight to protect them from other aliens. The series is filled with quirky characters navigating their own personal dramas alongside the extraterrestrial threats.
Season 4 starts off with Harry in a rough spot, held captive on a gray-alien moon base while a shapeshifting praying-mantis-like alien (also played by Tudyk, and voiced by Clancy Brown in voiceover) has taken over his life. Tudyk directed the first two episodes of season 4: He’d been discussing a director role with series creator and showrunner Chris Sheridan since season 3. But he didn’t appreciate how difficult that would actually be for him and the rest of the cast.
“[Chris and I] still haven’t healed,” Tudyk joked to Polygon in a video interview. “Our relationship is still in shambles, in tatters.”
Resident Alien always films two episodes at a time, so Tudyk needed to commit to helming a pair of them.
“It was a very generous thing, to let me take the reins for a short time,” Tudyk said. “The cast was so nice to me. I saw moments — I’d be giving them some direction, and I’d see the look of an actor going, ‘OK, I’ll humor you. I think I understand what you’re saying at this moment. Let me just give you what I know you want.’ They know their characters well enough.”
In spite of Tudyk’s self-effacing reservations, co-star Elizabeth Bowen said she loved working with him as a director.
“I told him before we started, I love notes like ‘Have you tried this thing?’ I won’t be sensitive about it,” she said during the junket. “I was very excited to play.”
Tudyk says the hardest actor to direct was himself.
“That’s tricky,” he said. “I don’t recommend it. I mean I’ll do it again, but when you’re acting and directing simultaneously, there are moments when you’re watching your fellow actors as a director when you should just be acting. You have to train your brain not to think about the result.”
Photo: James Dittiger/USA Network
Co-star Corey Reynolds was impressed with how much Tudyk juggled on the project.
“When you add in all of the factors that had to come into play in those first two episodes, where he’s not only directing, but starring in the episodes, playing an alien pretending to be [a different] alien pretending to be a human — I thought he did a great job,” Reynolds told Polygon.
Tudyk had previously written, directed and starred in the semi-autobiographical web series Con Man, but directing Resident Alien gave him a newfound respect for how complex the show is.
“It’s exciting to work with so many different artists that have been working on this show for so long that I don’t get to communicate with typically because I’m just off in my world acting,” Tudyk said. “Just watching everybody put this together and see how much they care about their jobs and how much it means to them was a gift.”
Resident Alien season 4 premieres on Syfy and USA at 11 p.m. ET Friday, June 6. Episodes will be available to stream on Peacock one week later.