Essie Davis didn’t watch much horror growing up in Tasmania; the 55-year-old actor can still bitterly recall the moment when, aged four, she was left
Essie Davis didn’t watch much horror growing up in Tasmania; the 55-year-old actor can still bitterly recall the moment when, aged four, she was left at home while her older siblings went to see Jaws at the local cinema in Hobart.
“I stood by the back door going, ‘I will remember this day for the rest of my life!’” Davis recalls, speaking from her current family home, also in Tasmania.
She finally saw the film on VHS years later, while dating a production designer she had met while performing at Belvoir St theatre. That designer was Justin Kurzel, now one of Australia’s most celebrated directors – and also her husband. Back in the mid-90s, Kurzel’s courtship rituals included a crash course in horror classics – Jaws was high on the list, followed closely by Ridley Scott’s 1979 space slasher Alien.
“I love that first Alien film so much, I wish I’d seen it in a cinema,” Davis says. “They’re definitely a huge part of my film psyche.”
It would take another few decades before Davis entered the Alien universe herself, in a modern prequel series set shortly before the original film. Alien: Earth focuses on Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a “forever girl” whose consciousness is transferred from her terminally ill human body to a synthetic one, making her a world-first “hybrid”. Davis plays Dame Sylvia, one of the scientists responsible for Wendy’s second life. In one of many allusions to Peter Pan, Hawley named the character after Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the real-life mother of the boys who inspired JM Barrie to write his Neverland saga.
The show’s themes – and Sylvia’s attempts to balance Wendy’s humanity with her modern, artificial immortality – felt particularly timely to Davis.
“AI was a thing that was coming, but it wasn’t suddenly upon us,” she says. “And then we had the writers’ strike and the actors’ strike, and then ChatGPT suddenly was in the schools in Tasmania, and I was just going, ‘hang on a minute’.
“There’s a tightrope of ethics and morality, and everyone has a different version of it. I really hope that people will enjoy this and get hooked into that quandary of genetic engineering and ethics and that strange quest to own everything and beat everyone and be younger than anyone.”
Davis is a horror icon herself, thanks to a breakout role in Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film The Babadook. The low-budget Australian production became a global hit, with fans including The Exorcist director William Friedkin, who placed the film alongside Alien as one of the scariest films he had ever seen. It remains a current cult classic 10 years later.
“I remember watching a screening way before it was released, and just went, ‘Oh, this is great, but it’s not scary’,” she says. “And then we went to the Sundance film festival, and I sat up the back as people swore and leapt out of their seats.”
Davis in The Babadook. Photograph: Icon Film Distribution/Sportsphoto/Allstar
Davis credits the film’s enduring appeal – its top-hatted spook has even been embraced as an unlikely Queer icon – to something deeper than jump scares. “It’s not just a horror film,” she says. “It’s in fact a kind of psychological thriller about mental health and grief and parenting and love.”
It remains a defining role for Davis, alongside her star turn in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries – the 1920s detective franchise that ran for three series and a film, based on the novels of Kerry Greenwood, who died in April. “A terrible loss, but she’s forever in us now,” says Davis.
“I was crying, working out whether I should do it or not,” she adds, of donning Phryne Fisher’s signature black bob. “I’m really glad I did, because that character was such a positive force, and it’s just so fun to play someone so clever and positive and naughty and irreverent – and someone who really cares about social justice, and is not going to bow for anyone, and stands up for the underdog.”
Davis as Phryne Fisher in the film Miss Fisher and The Crypt of Tears. Photograph: AP
Along with roles in Game of Thrones, Baby Teeth and Netflix’s One Day, Davis has also collaborated with her film-maker husband, responsible for films including Snowtown, Nitram, and television adaptations of Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang and most recently Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Davis appeared in the latter three.
Their kids were ancient enough to be watching Alien for a high school English class when the script for Alien: Earth hit Davis’s inbox; the series is led by Noah Hawley, the showrunner behind the award-winning small-screen adaptation of Fargo. She was intrigued; the show’s depiction of a future Earth carved up and controlled by mega-corporations – Dame Sylvia is employed by Prodigy, a rival to the franchise’s longstanding faceless villains, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation – particularly resonated with her.
“It’s terribly prescient – the richest of corporations and the richest people taking over the world, essentially running the world,” she says.
David Rysdahl as Arthur and Davis as Dame Sylvia in Alien: Earth. Photograph: Copyright 2025, FX. All Rights Reserved.
For Davis, the perils of corporate profits have been plain to see from her home in Tasmania, where she and Kurzel returned to raise their family.
“It is terrifying what is happening to our beautiful place here in Tassie, and the total corporate capture of our government by big industry,” she says of the controversy around the state’s fish farming industry, of which she has become one of many high-profile critics, alongside Richard Flanagan and former ABC journalist turned political candidate Peter George.
These days, Davis doesn’t have to go to the cinema to witness coastal dread. “When you look out over the water from Bruny Island, everywhere you look you see rows and rows of fish pens, and huge, industrial factory ships,” she says. “We had mass fish mortalities, rotting salmon washing up on our beaches. And 53 cormorants got shot because they were fishing out of the pens.”
Davis says the public opposition to such practices “began as lots of individuals around Tasmania making constructive criticism, and asking for a bit of negotiation on pollution”. It was being ignored by salmon companies and successive governments, she says, that connected and galvanised the far-flung island community.
What began as a movement, Davis says, has now become an “insurrection”, evident in the rise of Peter George, who was elected to Tasmania’s state parliament as an independent days after our interview.
“But we’re not going to stop,” she says. “We’re just going to keep on until we have people representing the people of Tasmania and not just corporations and party politics.
“I guess Alien is a warning, isn’t it?” she adds. “A warning of what greed and money and this kind of pursuit of immortality can do to a planet.”
Alien: Earth launches on Disney+ on 12 August in Australia and the US and on 13 August in the UK
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