Michael Fassbender on Playing Two Robots in Alien: Covenant

Getting to play two roles in the same film must be like catnip for an actor, and Michael Fassbender of "Alien: Covenant" tends to agree, with one major condition.

"If they're written well," he tells Made in Hollywood reporter Kylie Erica Mar. "Otherwise, it's a nightmare. You've got to do double duty with something that's not good."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCBY15ZMVyA&t=131s

Fassbender plays a pair of robots, David and Walter, in the latest installment of the venerable "Alien" franchise that dates back to the 1979 original.

"Thankfully, these characters were really well written," he says. "They were sort of at opposites, meaning David is very effusive, expressive, even quite theatrical. Walter is just a very simple AI in terms of he's supposed to be pretty straightforward. He's pretty bland."

In this follow-up to "Prometheus" in 2012, Fassbender's David is the synthetic survivor of the doomed Prometheus expedition, meeting a colony ship carrying Katherine Waterston and Billy Crudup bound for a remote planet they hope will be a paradise but turns into something much darker and more dangerous. Walter is an updated version of the same droid.