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SYFY WIRE Resident Alien

Resident Alien gives a whole new meaning to the term 'rodent breath' in Episode 2 teaser

By Josh Weiss
Resident Alien

The town of Patience, Colorado has itself a new doctor, and he's got a thing or two to learn about bedside manner.

In the hilarious teaser for Episode 2 of SYFY's Resident Alien, the alien masquerading as Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) starts seeing patients and metaphorically bashing them over the head with such medical questions as: "Concerning your breath, did you recently eat a dead rodent?" In addition, Harry's got to contend with Max (Judah Prehn), the young boy who can see right through his fleshy disguise. Far from trying to establish a rapport with the kid who can blow his cover, the alien threatens to eat Max.

Elsewhere, Sheriff Mike Thompson (Corey Reynolds) and Deputy Liv Baker (Elizabeth Bowen) are starting their investigation into Sam Hodges' murder. But that mystery pales in comparison to Harry's plan to murder the entire human race ... if he can find his doomsday device, that is.

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"The way I approach [the role] is, and especially in the early episodes where he's just learning to be in front of people for the first time, is that he's been walking and moving around for a couple of months, but only a couple of months," Tudyk explained to SYFY WIRE. "And learning to speak. So when you say the words, you're forming each word almost on its own, so that becomes an affectation by itself. And he's still holding on to old movements, like [his] claws that come up every once in a while."

When it came to donning the alien makeup, the actor was totally game to pile on all the prosthetics, which took about two hours to apply. However, some scenes involving the extra-terrestrial in its true form were done with a stuntperson for the sake of convenience.

"In the pilot, we didn’t have time for me to go into the makeup all the time, so I don’t think it was ever me in the pilot," Tudyk revealed to us at the show's press junket last week. "We went back and reshot some of it because we realized that I needed to do the acting. We could do it with the series; we just worked it into the schedule that we could put two hours into me getting made up, but Keith [the stuntperson] is there to do stunts and a lot of times you see Harry in reflections. So, Keith will be there in the makeup, so I can just step out and we can do the reflection with him as opposed to doing two hours of makeup for just a reflection."

New episodes of Resident Alien will premiere on SYFY every Wednesday. If you have a cable subscription, you can check out the first three episodes via On Demand, OneApp, Apple TV, and Roku. Starting Wednesday, Feb. 3, the first two installments will be free to stream on the official SYFY YouTube channel.

For SYFY WIRE's official recap of the pilot episode, click here.

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