Damon Lindelof Shares Details on Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron’s Roles in PROMETHEUS

The official Lost podcast was one of my first ventures into internet radio.  If I learned anything from hours of listening to showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse deconstruct their show, I learned those two men are fantastic at elaborating on past story and teasing future developments in a way that excites more than it spoils.  Lindelof worked without Cuse on the script for Prometheus, but that skill thankfully carries over.

MTV spoke to Lindelof at Comic-Con, when he shared what it was like to collaborate with Ridley Scott, revealed more about the roles of Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron, and explained a link between the prequel and the Alien franchise.  Read the quotes after the jump.

To describe Fassbender’s robot character, Lindelof turned to another Scott film:

“[Fassbender] plays a robot. One of the things that evokes the idea of Blade Runner is, ‘What does the movie look like from the robot’s point of view?’ If you were to ask him, ‘What do you think about all of this? What’s going on? What do you think about these humans who are around you?,’ wouldn’t it be cool if we found a way for that robot to answer those questions. When you cast a guy like Fassbender, who’s going to bring a lot more to it than [makes clichéd robot movements] — that was me doing the robot, I don’t know if you could tell.”

Theron’s character, on the other hand, will be very familiar to Alien fans—with room for surprises, of course:

“[Theron's] character’s name is Meredith Vickers and she’s sort of a corporate entity. That’s another one of the familiar things from the Alien movies — that there are corporate interests in play. I feel like Charlize brought a new spin on that old variation. It’s a remix …. I don’t think she’s slimy [like Paul Reiser's character in Aliens]. She’s not the fast-talking, snake-oil face of the company. By the way, “What company is she a face of?,” I think is a big part of the fun. As we were developing the script, she had some really cool ideas that made it not the suit you’re used to.”

Fassbender and Theron are joined by Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, and Patrick Wilson.  In other words, Prometheus has a terrific cast.  Lindelof agrees, though perhaps for different reasons:

“I think one of the really cool things about the first Alien, if you watch it cold, Ripley is kind in the background like one of the crew members, and you’re like, ‘Skerrit’s [who played Captain Dallas] the hero of the movie,’ and he’s one of the first to go. And then you’re like, ‘It’s [the engineer played by] Harry Dean Stanton.’ And, no, he’s gone… and suddenly Sigourney Weaver, in the last 40 minutes of the movie, is the only one left alive. I think the idea of building a really cool ensemble and again presenting the audience with like, ‘Who’s going to be left standing at the end of this movie? Maybe all of them. Probably not,’ [that's] part of the fun of what we set out to do.”

As far as I can tell, Prometheus is shaping up to be the best possible version of an Alien prequel.  The lingering question is whether such a movie should exist at all.  Answer forthcoming on June 8, 2012.

Here’s the video of the interview MTV finally got around to posting: