"Big things have small beginnings." Borrowed from David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, that line is the mantra and succinct summation of Michael Fassbender's synthetic, David. The scene-stealing standout from Ridley Scott's Prometheus, David is an early Weyland Corp. model, designed not only to look human but to mimic human behavior, who contracted more than a few human characteristics in the process. The very same robot who, with a stroke of ego, curiosity, and a touch of envy, seems to have put mother nature on the course to create Alien's iconic "perfect organism".

If you need a refresher, David set in motion many of the most catastrophic events in Prometheus by using Noomi Rapace's Elizabeth Shaw and her lover/partner Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) as test subjects. David infected Charlie with the mysterious black goo, set up Shaw to get impregnated Charlie, released the so-called Last Engineer, and ultimately set off a chain of events that led to the birth of the Deacon, AKA the awfully familiar-looking alien that carved its way out of the Engineer's chest at the end of the film. David also got his head ripped off in the end, but don't you worry, he's back for Alien: Covenant, and you better believe he's up to his same old tricks.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Last summer, I was lucky enough to visit the set of Alien: Covenant in Sydney, Australia, where I had the opportunity to tour the sound stages and sets, obsessively pore over concept art, and speak at length with the cast and crew of Ridley Scott's latest entry in the Alien saga. While there, I joined a small group of journalists to speak with Fassbender, and he had some rather interesting things to say about how David has changed in the ten years since we last saw him and how he's ben spending his time.

To get the obvious question out of the way -- yes, we will see him as a disembodied head, but yes, he will also get his body back. On a broader scale, we learned that David and Shaw landed on an Engineer planet (as they set out to do at the end of Prometheus), where they have spent the last ten years. Or at least, he has. It's not clear how long Shaw survived or what state she might be in at the time Covenant picks up. But let's just say, things don't look good for her. Much like LV-223, the planet they landed on in Prometheus, this new planet is littered with the bodies of Engineers -- this time taking a cue from Pompeii, the strewn corpses charred and eternally fixed in their moment of death. From there, it's a bit of a mystery, and everyone on set was keen to keep their secrets under wraps, but there were a few hints to be gleaned.

According to Fassbender, the biggest change we'll see in David is an even greater shift towards his human characteristics:

It’s been ten years since we last saw him, without any maintenance. So those human qualities have sort of gathered momentum a little bit, I suppose. They’re as much a part of him now as his synthetic qualities.

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Image via 20th Century Fox

What we do know from some concept art is that David has made himself a lab and kept busy there with experiments (we also saw Engineer and Facehugger specimens in the creature shop, which could be a part of his research), and according to Fassbender, David's hobbies are an extension of the artistic and egoist qualities we saw in him during Prometheus:

He’s the kind of guy that likes to keep himself busy, I suppose, and believes that idle hands are the devil’s work. But his interest in the way things work, his interest in creation, we could see that in Prometheus. 'These guys created humans, humans created us.' This idea of creation and life and nature and art. There’s this sort of artist in there somewhere, there’s definitely an ego in there; we saw that before. So again these are very human things. I suppose he’s on this planet and — like a human — [thinking,] 'Why do we do all this?' We want to leave something of us behind after we go. There’s a legacy of some sort that we’ve left behind.

And it's safe to say that after watching an Engineer casually beat the life out of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), David has lost his awe for humanity and has moved on from his small beginnings to bigger things:

Well, we sort of saw in Prometheus the concept of David witnessing Weyland meeting his creator, and so David was in some respects, as Peter Weyland was, in awe of his creator. Until you see the fallacies of your creator, and how mortal they can be. I think he’s moved on. I think it would be fair to say.

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What has he moved on to? Well, obviously no one was willing to share the details of his cunning schemes, but we did learn that he has found a new home of sorts in an Engineer temple called The Hall of Heads; a sacred and historical space where the Engineers stored their information. As for the details, don't expect Covenant to detail exactly how David has spent the last decade, but Fassbender says there will be plenty of hints and visual cues to fill you in, and "his appreciation of beauty and nature" is still a driving factor:

It's referenced in the film. You have an idea. It doesn’t go into detail like “Day 1” — he doesn’t have his calendar or anything. But obviously, I fill in those things just like I’d do with any other character. What happens before we see them in the story that we’re watching. So, like I said there’s a lot of information there that’s given, and there’s a lot of visual things to fill in those gaps if you will. So that was definitely helpful for me, in terms of what has been occupying his time. Those traits that we saw in Prometheus, his appreciation of beauty and nature, that’s all relevant.

And while we all love David and his twisted, curious ways, Fassbender is also introducing another synthetic in Covenant, the next-generation model called Walter. Unlike the David 8's, which effectively creeped the hell out of people with uncanny valley vibe, Walter is a nuts and bolts robot, stripped of any human characteristics: 

Walter is very much a synthetic minus any of the human traits. So when the David 8’s came out, there was a resistance from people to that model. Because it freaked them out a little bit. Because he was demonstrating a lot of human qualities, and his programming was veering towards human characteristics, like ego and vanity and pride. They found that to be not so much useful as opposed to making people uncomfortable, so they designed the following models with fewer of those human traits. Well, none of them really. So Walter is just a very straightforward, logical synthetic really. He’s more like a Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Spock type character. Whereas David is…

Not only are we going to see Fassbender doing double duty, we will see the characters meet and interact. Waterson described it as one of the coolest things she's ever seen on screen and joked, "I’m so excited for it.... and also jealous because they’re totally going to steal my thunder; those two robots."

Peruse the links to the rest of my set visit coverage below. Alien: Covenant opens in theaters on May 19th.

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