‘Invasion’ Creator Simon Kinberg on How the X-Men Influenced the Apple TV+ Series

Simon Kinberg knows sci-fi. As producer of The Martian and one of the primary stewards of the X-Men film franchise, including its many spinoffs, Kinberg has helped shape pop culture’s perception of the genre. But even with a filmography that zooms from one end of cosmos to another, from Star Wars Rebels to The Twilight Zone, there’s one type of story that Kinberg’s spent decades waiting to tell: a grounded and global story of extraterrestrial life making contact with Earth.

With Invasion on Apple TV+, Kinberg finally gets to tell the kind of close encounter story that he’s always wanted to see. The series, which just dropped its first three episodes on Apple TV+, is a grounded and methodical look at what an alien invasion would possibly look like—and not what it would look like to world leaders or spies or superheroes or generals, either. Invasion’s global point-of-view remains firmly ground level, with everyday people—a small town sheriff, an ex-doctor, a soldier, a bullied kid—caught up in events they can’t possibly understand.

Ahead of Invasion’s debut, Decider caught up with Kinberg for a chat about his unique—yet classic—take on the alien invasion sub-genre, how real world reports of life in outer space tend to sync up with his projects, how Invasion actually has a lot in common with X-Men, and—of course—the brilliance of Sam Neill.

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Decider: You’ve mentioned that War of the Worlds was a source of inspiration for Invasion. How did that inspiration manifest during the production of the show?

Simon Kinberg: Yeah, I would say I was more influenced by Orson Welles’s radio play of War of the Worlds than I was even H. G. Wells’s novel, which I also loved. And what I loved about and had been obsessed about with the Orson Welles radio play is that he did something so realistically that people truly believed that we were being invaded by by aliens. Obviously in today’s world with social media and technology and marketing and all that, you could never pull off a stunt like that. But I wanted the show to feel as real and grounded and believable as what Orson Welles was able to do with War of the Worlds.

And to me, also, the H. G. Wells novel is sort of the origin, the Mount Rushmore of alien invasion stories. I wanted to create our generation’s, our world’s, version of that feeling of true invasion—but I wanted to do it in a global scale. It was important to me that this show feel like it wasn’t just going to be Americans and British—white people—running around being invaded by aliens, but that it was really going to reflect the world in which we live and it was going to take place in all these different continents with all these different cultures and people, and that you were going to be following totally different storylines and the ways that they were all impacted by this singular traumatic event.

The thing that unites all of these stories from across the globe is that they’re all told from the point of view of people who aren’t in the know. They aren’t the big decision-makers. You have to advance the plot using characters who aren’t going to get an expert debriefing in Episode 2.

What was important to me was that this show be a character-driven show, that it’d be something where the drama and the struggles they were having, and the heartbreak and the falling in love and falling out of love, all of that stuff be interesting and compelling enough that you would watch the show regardless of the aliens. That’s always important, right? Something that X-Men does, as well as any storytelling in history, is that you love these characters—and then rays come out of their eyes.

It was important to me that the alien invasion felt—through what I have studied through friends at NASA, consultants at NASA, at the Pentagon and other places who have really spent time thinking about what an alien visitation would be like—that it feel as real as possible. And that doesn’t look most likely like a bunch of alien ships that come and blow up the White House. It would be mysterious. It would be gradual. You would not understand what was happening other than that something was happening.

I think it actually does go back to X-Men: this is a show that is about real people. I created characters who are all alienated in their lives before the invasion happens. Aneesha’s alienated as someone whose marriage falls apart, and also as a Syrian American in predominantly white suburbs. Mitsuki’s character in Japan is alienated by the fact that she is gay in a culture that’s hard to be out in. The kid, Casper’s alienated by the fact that he’s just an outsider. He’s the kid who’s bullied like we’ve seen in so many movies and television shows before. And Trevante is an outsider in the sense that he has a secret and he has a past that he’s running away from. So I wanted these characters to all feel like they were united in their shared, very human, very X-Men feeling of alienation before this invasion happens—and then the invasion’s a magnifying glass that burns all that up and explodes it onto a much bigger stage.

The cast also includes Sam Neill—truly one of the great character actors and my personal favorite actor. How did he get involved in the show and what did he bring to the role of Sheriff Tyson? 

He’s a huge favorite of mine, too, and I didn’t think about him when I was writing the role. But I don’t really think about actors when I’m writing roles. What I did think about was finding a great actor with a strong body of work, but who was not so overwhelming as an icon or a movie star that you felt like you were watching Clint Eastwood or Indiana Jones playing a small town sheriff. I felt like, yes, [Sam] is a star and I love his body of work, but the body of work is diverse enough and he’s enough of a character actor that I will believe him in this role in a show that is really about trying to be as grounded and real as possible.

And he is our one quote, unquote “star” in the show. I didn’t want [the casting] to feel like it popped you out of the reality we were trying to create, and Sam just fits all of that. He’s this extraordinary and, like you say, somewhat under-appreciated actor. So we reached out to him, he read the script, he liked the script, he was not intimidated by being a [New Zealander] playing a small town American sheriff. He liked the opportunity to do something different and, when you look at his career, what’s so cool is he just does lots of different types of work.

Oh yeah—I’ve spent much of quarantine watching his filmography and you see lots of very small New Zealand films to big budget action movies. It’s also great seeing Golshifteh Farahani as the emotional center of the show. What led her to Invasion?

One of the things I really love—and I’ve done this in lots of different movies—is taking actors who are not traditionally action or genre actors, who are more dramatic actors, and kidnapping them into the genre world. That’s something we did with the X-Men movies. If you look at Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy to some extent, Jennifer Lawrence—so many actors come out of the indie film world. I just did this with [my next film] The 355 with Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o to some extent.

With Golshifteh, I love her work. I was very aware of her work. I have been a fan of hers for a long time. She obviously has worked in international cinema that’s been dramatic. I mean, she was in Extraction [with Chris Hemsworth on Netflix], but not in a protagonist role. And for me, Aneesha, the character [Farahani] plays, is the protagonist of our show. It’s critical when you’re making an ensemble story to choose a protagonist. And as an example—sorry to keep harkening back to the X-Men, but I’m looking at you and seeing it over your shoulder—in the X-Men, each of the different movies I worked on, we had different protagonists. So like [in X-Men:] Days of Future Past, it seems like Wolverine is the protagonist because he’s in both time periods, but really the protagonist is Charles because he has the broadest arc over the span of the film. That’s how I define the protagonist: not screen time, not dialogue, but the person who has the broadest and the biggest evolution. Aneesha’s character is the one who has the biggest evolution over the span of at least the first season, and I really wanted to find an actress that I thought could play that dramatic gravity and brought the weight, but also nuance and vulnerability and fragility. Golshifteh really delivered beyond my wildest expectations in the show.

Invasion is a show about an alien invasion. The other part of that phrase is, of course, “alien.” What thought went into the alien designs, especially since the show is so grounded and aliens can be pretty unreal?

That’s a really good question. One of the one of the biggest challenges of this show was making sure that the visual effects element of it and the epic scale of it didn’t overwhelm the intimacy and the reality of the show. When we went through the concept work—and we had the best people in the world from Weta [Digital] on down helping us with concept work, with the aliens and their ships—we wanted to make it feel unlike things we’ve seen before, which is hard because there’ve been great aliens from Ridley [Scott]’s on down. But [we wanted the aliens to] also feel organic and real and from another galaxy, or at least another planet. We did a lot of work.

And for me, it was also about what you don’t see. It was about the mystery. It was about the flickers of things, seeing something in the background, the audience having to lean in as opposed to being pushed back by a bombardment of it. We did a lot of work to make those aliens feel hopefully as grounded as the rest of the show, despite the fact that they’re not of our world. And that was really about creating a physics for them and a biology for them that felt consistent and fully thought through.

Also while you were working on this show, all that New York Times reporting came out about the government’s very real investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena. What was it like seeing that play out while working on a show about an alien invasion?

I’ve done research into alien stuff. For many, many years, I’ve been wanting to tell an alien invasion story—probably most of my career, as I love science fiction and I love genre storytelling. And this is one of the sub-genres of science fiction that I’ve always loved and looked for the right way to tell. So I had a lot of that information going in, in the same way that when we made The Martian, I had a lot of information about Mars. And then all of a sudden, I think a week or two before the movie opened, they discovered that there was water on Mars.

Similarly here, I did know a lot of the information that got exposed by the government. But yeah, that stuff happened while we were shooting. It became very mainstream while we were shooting, and more is obviously coming out now and there’ll be more to come. That’s part of what’s so endlessly fascinating for us about the notion of aliens out there. We get clues about, okay, there’s a Goldilocks planet out there that seems like it probably would be good for life. We’re seeing this microbial life in certain places, we’re finding water on Mars, which is an indicator of life. All these things are clues in the universe that are starting to add up to a singular understanding that there has to be alien life out there.

Lastly, this might be just to humor me, but it feels on-topic considering our conversation: if you were to cast Sam Neill as any X-Men character, who would it be?

[Laughs] Well, I think I’d cast young Sam Neill as Cyclops, and I think I would cast older Sam Neill as—you’d have to—Professor X.

The first three episodes of Invasion are available to stream now on Apple TV+, with new episodes released every Friday.

Stream Invasion on Apple TV+