‘What if Steve Jobs was an alien?’: reinventing David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth

“If somebody said, tomorrow, intelligent extra-terrestrial life has been found, I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Chiwetel Ejiofor. “It would be like, ‘Oh, I see, right, OK.’ It would be exciting, but it wouldn’t be a total revelation.”

I’m in a room with two of Britain’s finest actors. Ejiofor, the Oscar-nominated star of 12 Years a Slave, is sitting beside his fellow Londoner, Naomie Harris, similarly Oscar-nominated for her stunning performance as a crack-addicted mother in Moonlight, yet probably best known as Moneypenny in the three most recent Bond films. Ejiofor is eating a bag of crisps and chatting about his early memories of one of the great films of the 1970s, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth.

“I watched the film in my teens, and so much of it went over my head. It’s quite a peculiar film…” he says. “I’ve appreciated [it] much more over time. But what stood out was the absolutely iconic look and feel in a very early role for David Bowie.”

Therein lies the scale of the task that 44-year-old Ejiofor has taken on. Roeg’s adaptation of Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel, about an extraterrestrial on a ­cosmic mission to find water for his dying planet, starred Bowie at his most alien as the mysterious ­visitor who assumes the earthly identity of Thomas Jerome Newton. The result was a visually haunting parable about dislocation, Icarus-like failure and the biblical Fall.

Now, a new television series, set 45 years after the action of the film, sees Ejiofor playing Faraday, another traveller from the planet Anthea who falls to Earth to fulfil the mission that Newton could never complete. And where the original had Candy Clark as a spaced-out hotel employee who introduces Newton to alcohol, sex and a very human kind of love, the new show casts Harris as Justin Falls, a nuclear physicist who has, says the actress, “been punishing herself” in menial biohazard jobs since an experiment went seriously wrong, and is unwittingly crucial to the Anthean’s quest.

In the 1976 film, Bowie’s Newton sets up World Enterprises Corporation to generate financial resources from nine patents for futuristic alien technology. That was the jumping off point for the new show’s creators, former Star Trek showrunner Alex Kurtzman and writer Jenny Lumet, who in 2019 noted how The Man Who Fell to Earth seemingly “foretold Steve Jobs’s and Elon Musk’s impact on our world”. And so they asked themselves: “What if Steve Jobs was an alien?” From there it was one small step to Ejiofor’s character, Faraday.

Ejiofor recalls hearing Jobs launch the original iPhone in 2007, which felt like “a kind of alien communication, because it’s so distinct and ­different.” Compared to Jobs’s achievements, he says, “none of us are going to be anywhere near to so profoundly changing the human experience forever.”

Musk, too, with his scheme to build spaceships to transport a million humans to live on Mars, has a distinctly unearthly perspective. I ­wonder what Harris makes, though, of his plan to buy that roiling sea of human thought, Twitter. “I’m excited, because of what he stands for about greater freedom of speech,” she says. “I’m perturbed by what I’m seeing, in terms of there being only one argument and one viewpoint that seems to be allowed in the media at the moment. That’s quite disturbing. And I think we’re having this slow erosion of freedom of speech. I love the idea of ­someone who is saying, ‘I’m going to reinstate true free speech.’”

Very interesting, I say. “Why is that very interesting?” she responds. Because I know Harris is politically engaged, and Musk seems to lean in the opposite direction. “But that’s the wonderful thing about freedom of speech, right?” she says. “It’s to allow all voices regardless, I don’t necessarily agree with Musk’s politics. But I want a platform which allows all voices to be heard. And that’s not the direction that we’re going in currently.”

Harris and Ejiofor make a fascinating combination. Both are engaging and articulate; he’s serious and thoughtful, she’s direct and laughs more. Both seem disconcerted (though remain tight-lipped) when I mention Harris’s admission on American TV that they used to date in their 20s, even more so when I ask if they got equal pay for the new series, in which their roles feel well balanced amid a cast that also includes Bill Nighy in Bowie’s shoes as Thomas Newton, and The Wire’s Clarke Peters as Justin’s elderly father. “I don’t think we’ve ever discussed our salaries,” Harris says. “And it is called The Man Who Fell to Earth, to be fair.”

It’s the first time they’ve worked together. ­Ejiofor’s role is, in truth, an enormous technical challenge, as Faraday lands on Earth wearing a human “skin suit” but lacking any knowledge of our ­language or behaviour. The actor has to portray ­Faraday’s rapidly evolving stages of appearing human, while retaining an alien mindset. To ­complicate things, Ejiofor notes, “we shot completely out of sequence, over 10 episodes, in a few different countries”.

Harris, meanwhile, located her character’s toughness and single-minded devotion to her daughter and ailing father in her own mother’s determination as a single parent. “As someone who has chosen not to have children, I’m always just in awe of parents generally, because I think it’s such a sacrificial thing to do,” she says. “I almost have extra awe for parents who do it on their own, whether male or female… And that’s what my mum did, you know, 19 years old, my mum had me, no money whatsoever. And not only raised me, but did it exceptionally well – she instilled in me the belief that I could achieve absolutely anything. And I never felt that there was a lack, growing up.”

Harris, who studied social and political sciences at Cambridge before going to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, didn’t have any contact with her father, fashion designer Brian Clarke, when she was growing up. He had come to the UK from Trinidad as a child, and met her mother, Carmen Harris, who would go on to become an EastEnders’ scriptwriter, in London. In a moving episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2019, Harris traced the Caribbean roots of both sides of her family. She discovered that on her mother’s side, her five-times great-grandmother had been an African slave, while on her father’s side, her four-times great-grandfather was from Somerset and had been an overseer of slaves on a small plantation. The programme (worth searching out on iPlayer) captures Harris’s sadness, and acceptance.

The Man Who Fell to Earth seems calculated at times to tackle issues of race head on. In the opening sequence, there is a flash-forward of Faraday presenting his world-changing technology on stage, Steve Jobs-style, describing himself as an immigrant and a refugee, before we go back to follow his time on Earth from the start, when, naked and unarmed, though behaving very strangely, he is Tasered by cops at a petrol station in Arizona.

Ejiofor, though, is keen to draw a distinction between the themes of migration and race. “The immigrant experience is a really important part of this story. That idea of not just looking at migration in the context of what somebody might take from a place, but what they bring. That has always been the fundamental part of migration. The strength of it to host nations is that people bring energies, they bring information, they bring culture...

“As a metaphor, it’s something that resonates very deeply with me. My own family emigrated from Nigeria to the UK, so that experience is something that I understand very well and very personally, and it’s so clearly reflected in the story.

“And then race. Clearly, there are races on Anthea,” says Ejiofor. His own character Faraday is a “Drone”, whereas Nighy’s Newton is an “Adept”.

“But their meaning, I think, is very different. The way we choose to interact with race on Earth is a choice. And on another planet, in another universe, people might choose to interact with race in a completely different way. They may think of it in the way that you think of the different colours of cats, you know – they’re all cats.”

Ejiofor and Harris both know that race has played a part in their careers. Are there roles that are still not available to them? “What are we talking about? There are tons of roles that are not available for people of colour,” says Ejiofor. “In a realistic way, that’s not to say that it has to change overnight, but obviously the idea that people still hold the distinctions of colour as fundamentally important is enough, in and of itself, to shut people out of roles.

“The fact that we move into the conversations of colour and race as effortlessly as we do, as if those aren’t just invented concepts, in order to make us more distinct and put certain people over other people… obviously, that’s what those things are for. And yes, there are a million roles and concepts that almost by definition exclude certain people.”

Harris feels the same, although, she adds, “I’m also really excited about the direction that things are going in. I think there’s been huge change since my career started, and it’s like 35-years long.” She’s only 45, but made her first TV appearance in 1987 on the children’s show Simon and the Witch. “I just always knew that I was going to be an actress, no matter what anybody told me. And despite not having anybody in the profession when I was growing up. I still look back at coming to LA in my 20s. And it just all seems so impossible, to dream of making it in this industry. It seems so impenetr­able. And yet, somehow, I got in, and I was able to get jobs and make it work. Now, I would be terrified. Because knowing what I know now, it’s tough.”

It was only after Moonlight – which famously pipped La La Land to the Best Picture Oscar in 2017 – that “the floodgates opened” for her. Before it, “there are huge gaps between roles that were sent my way,” she tells me. “Where I was at the start of my career, in terms of the opportunities that were available to me, and where I am now, it’s totally ­different… simply because the industry itself has changed. But there is absolutely further to go.”

In LA, Harris parlayed the talent she had already shown in UK productions, such as the BBC’s Zadie Smith adaptation White Teeth and Danny Boyle’s zombie film 28 Days Later, into studio juggernauts such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Miami Vice, before landing an eye-catching part in Skyfall. I’m conscious that we’re both sitting next to a man who is the current bookies’ favourite to replace Daniel Craig as James Bond. Does Moneypenny already know who the next 007 will be? She laughs. “Moneypenny does not know. And she doesn’t even wish that she did! That would be a weighty secret.”

Ejiofor, who has impressed for years in films such as Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, is giving nothing away – but he would certainly lend Bond a sensitive, ­cerebral quality that might fit well with the times. And he and Harris both have recent action blockbusters under their belts: Ejiofor as the mystical Baron Mordo opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in Marvel’s Doctor Strange films; Harris as the ear-­splitting mutant Shriek in last year’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

It’s been a while, though, since either has been on stage. What would tempt them back? “Me? Not much,” says Harris. “I think it’s where you hone your skill set as an actor, but I also think it’s one of the most terrifying things to do. I remember doing Frankenstein at the National [in 2011]. And literally every single night feeling like I was gonna throw up. I suffered so much with stage fright that I promised myself I would never do that to myself again!”

Ejiofor – who won an Olivier Award for his performance in the title role of Othello, opposite Ewan McGregor’s Iago, at the Donmar Warehouse – says his plan has always been to spend time on stage, do other things, then go back. “That plan has been interrupted by the last couple of years we’ve had,” he says. “So I might be a bit behind on my usual schedule, but I definitely want to get back on stage.” In fact, he’d like to do a play that dissects our experience of the pandemic. “We are profoundly different people than we were in 2019,” he says.

I wonder how he would have felt if, at the theatre in 2007, McGregor had told him that, 15 years later, both men would end up fronting sci-fi series that viewers could stream on their smartphones (McGregor plays the lead in the new Star Wars spin-off Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+). “It would have felt like a real stretch in my imagination,” Ejiofor says. “It is extraordinary to think of what has changed over a very short period of time. It was inconceivable.”

‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ launches on Paramount+ on Wednesday