The Acting Olyphants

Timothy Olyphant is Schrödinger’s celebrity. He works a lot, but we rarely see him. He’s in the fame sweet spot: recognizable but not hounded. But he walked outside in New York City, a place where celebrities are frequently photographed, and so he got photographed. Today Schrödinger’s celebrity exists.

He was spotted with his daughter, Vivian Olyphant, who appeared in Justified: City Primeval as the teenaged Willa Givens. I once dubbed her “nepo daughter” and the Olyphants perceived me, so hi if y’all are googling, I guess. Since City Primeval, Vivian hasn’t appeared in anything else, but she’s been knocking around New York’s theater scene, we’ll see what comes of that. I don’t think City Primeval was really a fair shake for her, Willa Givens disappeared from the series as if the writers didn’t really have a plan for her, so she didn’t have much to do (probably because Raylan Givens is not a character who requires a kid to drive plot). 

As for Timothy, he shot a movie with Jorma Taccone that kept coming up on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers podcast, so hopefully that comes out in a not unreasonable time frame. More immediately, he’s got the new Alien series, Alien: Earth, from Noah Hawley coming up, which looks appropriately freaky.

 

I don’t love all Alien media equally, but I will never tire of filmmakers and writers taking it on and trying whatever they want in that universe. It’s such a simple concept, Alien is basically a home invasion set in space, and like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, you realize humans are the invaders in a hostile environment they don’t belong in and never should have entered. The lore has expanded and compounded over the years, but at heart it remains a story about invasion and hostile environments. I’m SUPER interested to see what Noah Hawley does with that in context of bringing aliens to Earth. Alien has the narrative bigness Star Wars lacks? Discuss.