Alice Wetterlund as D’Arcy Bloom in RESIDENT ALIEN – Season 3 – “141 Seconds” | ©2024 Syfy/James Dittiger

By Season 3 of RESIDENT ALIEN, now airing Wednesday nights on Syfy and streaming on Peacock, Alice Wetterlund’s character, bartender D’Arcy Bloom, has had several major changes in her life. One is that she and best pal Asta Twelvetrees (Sara Tomko) are now sharing a house together in the mountain town of Patience, Colorado.

Another is that D’Arcy now knows that town doctor Harry Vanderspiegle (Alan Tudyk) who was originally sent to destroy humanity, but is now trying to protect us from another alien species, the Greys.

This isn’t Wetterlund’s first spin around the TV galaxy: she was also a series regular on PEOPLE OF EARTH, another science-fiction comedy that involved alien abduction. The Minnesota native’s other film and TV credits include THE INTERVIEW, SILICON VALLEY, MIKE AND DAVE NEED WEDDING DATES, and INTERROGATION.

At a party thrown by NBC/Universal and Syfy for the Winter 2024 Television Critics Association (TCA) press tour at Pasadena’s Langham Hotel, Wetterlund comes out into the garden to talk RESIDENT ALIEN, which was adapted for television by Chris Sheridan from the Dark Horse graphic novels. This interview combines that discussion with comments Wetterlund made on the RESIDENT ALIEN Q&A panel earlier in the day.

Wetterlund confesses that when she started on the series, she had no thoughts about where D’Arcy might be in the third season if they got one. “The character of D’Arcy, I found out rather quickly, is not in the original IP, she’s not part of the RESIDENT ALIEN Dark Horse comic books. So, I had no clue. There was no way for me to know where D’Arcy was going to end up. It was all in Chris’s imagination, all in the writers’ imagination.

“So, it was exciting, but it was also a little scary, and I think for me, the biggest compliment was that my acting in the pilot helped inform Chris of who this character was going to become, a lot. He told me there was a moment, I think it was when I was improvising at the funeral scene, where I said about Harry that he’s sexy in his grief. He was like, ‘Okay, I know how to write for this character now.’ And that was who she became. So, it feels like I had a role in it. But, yeah. Now she’s hanging from helicopters.”

This is literal – D’Arcy had a Season 2 sequence where she was leafleting Patience from the air. How was that done? “I just did it. It’s safe, people do it, and I’m not afraid of heights. I had the seatbelt on, and I was able to grab the handle and lean out. The wide shots were of me, actually, in the helicopter, hanging down. But the ones of me close up were of course on the ground. That was the harder part. The helicopter was on the ground, and the camera was below me, and I had sprinkle those papers, so that they didn’t have to VFX too many pieces of paper.”

While not hanging off a helicopter this season, Wetterlund relates, “I was climbing a wall in [Episode 2], where I had to use a rope pulley system and go in the window. And then there’s some stuff that nobody’s seen, that’s at the end of the season, that I find exciting.”

Just as series developer Sheridan was informed on how to write for D’Arcy by what Wetterlund was doing in her acting, Wetterlund says that her performance is partly informed by Tomko’s portrayal of Asta.

“That’s been my inspiration for the character. Asta is essentially Darcy’s love interest for the whole series – not romantically, but that’s her person, that’s the person she is chosen family with, that’s her lodestar, it’s her tether to reality. So, I think that’s been a lot of pressure for Asta’s character, to have this messy individual reliant on her. “I think that’s going to come to a head in Season 3, but we’ll see where it goes.”

On the first day of shooting Season 3, Wetterlund recalls the cast was so enthusiastic to be reunited on set that director Robert Duncan McNeill “yelled at us. If I have a scene with Sara, Sara and I get to the makeup chair earlier than everybody else – unless Alan’s in makeup, and then he’s there four hours before everybody else. So, we get to sit next to each other in the makeup chair, and we do go over our lines. But that’s just dialogue, because getting to the set, and not only being around each other, but being around our crew and our director, we really have a meshed chemistry as a group – those scenes where we’re in a group, it’s hard to contain the energy. It’s really about how excited we are to be around each other.”

D’Arcy has gone from knowing nothing about aliens to now being “in on pretty much everything – even more than Asta, in certain ways, toward the end of the season.”

Wetterlund feels that D’Arcy no longer blames Harry for the extraterrestrial threat. “I think she’s forgiven Harry a little bit, actually, because there is more that she understands that is going on now, and she’s able to put a context to it. I think she’s forgiven Harry a little bit for the stuff that she thought was him just being an a**hole. And now it’s starting to make a little more sense to her.”

The relationship between D’Arcy and Harry started with Harry seeing D’Arcy as “the annoying friend. For Harry’s character, it’s like, ‘Who is this annoying person that’s always trying to get in on my mission?’ And now that we know, it’s set up this weird sort of sibling thing where we grudgingly care for each other, like, ‘I guess if we absolutely have to, we won’t let the other one die’ kind of thing. And it’s really working for me anyway to play with that.

“As an actor, the challenge for me is to portray a character who is naturally suspicious, dealing with someone who’s acting suspicious constantly, and in a very gregarious, outlandish way, and sort of make that part of the scenery – ‘Well, I guess he’s going to do that.’ And now that she knows where he’s from, there’s a comfort. I think it’s one of those things where you’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll get past this, and now that I know what you are, it’ll be great.’ And then she’s like, ‘No, still not great. I don’t like the way you’re being.’ I think before, it was about, I just don’t understand why my best friend [Asta] has this relationship with this weirdo, who I don’t get. ‘He doesn’t want to date me. What’s that about?’ Now, at least there’s that common understanding.”

Now that Asta and D’Arcy are sharing a living space, Wetterlund reports that she and Tomko both got to confer with the design team about what should and shouldn’t be in their home. “There was a conversation before we created the apartment. Sara and I had input on what we would imagine, and I think our props department and our art department are so talented that they’re going to make something and we want to go with whatever their direction is, because it matches the tone of the show. But yeah, it felt right – except how clean it was.:

This is because D’Arcy’s emotions are reflected in her surroundings. “Definitely, D’Arcy’s not a decorator. She’s more of a bachelor. The way she lives is mattress on the floor, so I had to keep taking stuff out of the set in their plan for it. I had to keep saying, ‘No, she wouldn’t have an elaborate dresser, she wouldn’t have all her stuff hanging up.’ It’s very utilitarian, military style, almost.’ Because she’s somebody who travels a lot. She’s kind of a tomboy in that way. And Asta is just clutter.”

Asta and her family are Native Americans, which Wetterlund feels is a vital aspect of RESIDENT ALIEN’s story telling. “They’re super-important to Harry’s journey, because the relationship that the Western world, like colonizers, has with the environment is super-different than the relationship that [indigenous] people have with the land they inhabit. Harry’s point of view [at first] is that he has to destroy humanity because they’re killing the planet.

“For him to meet these other people that are human beings just walking around living, who don’t have that [destructive] relationship with the [Earth], it’s very confusing for him, and it’s been kind of teased throughout the series. So, I am really interested in where that’s going to go, this community that he’s getting closer and closer to as time progresses and their relationship to the world and the impact that’s having on his journey, and on his people’s journey.”

Given reports in the news, it seems that there is proof that extraterrestrials have at least hovered around Earth. Does Wetterlund feel at all affected by this information? “Personally, I don’t feel affected by it. It’s just something that I assumed always was there, but I think the government’s telling us that they don’t really know what’s going on as much as the rest of us thought they did, which is no surprise to me,” she laughs.

Wetterlund is happy that RESIDENT ALIEN is available to viewers on a variety of platforms, with the current season on Syfy, Peacock, and NBCU, previous seasons available on Netflix, and the source material available via Dark Horse Comics. As a result, the show’s popularity is growing.

“I think it just takes a while to catch on, right? And it has to be organic. It’s sci-fi. Sci-fan fans, we love lore, and I count myself a sci-fi fan. We love world-building, that’s one of the greatest things about it. And I think that a good sci-fi show does develop slowly in terms of character development and story, but also in terms of gaining an audience. We want to connect with viewers that are really going to appreciate this show and this world, and that takes a little while, and I think it’s happening. I think that’s a credit to everybody that supported it.”

And what would Wetterlund most like people to know about RESIDENT ALIEN Season 3?

“It’s the best season yet. I’ll stand by that.”

Related: Exclusive Interview with RESIDENT ALIEN actress Sara Tomko on Season 3

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Article: Exclusive Interview with RESIDENT ALIEN actress Alice Wetterlund on Season 3 of the Syfy series

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