Peter Dinklage is headed to Alien: Earth

The never-not-working Dinklage is fresh off a TV turn on fellow show-with-a-colon-in-it Dexter: Resurrection; he’ll now be graduating up to an altogether scarier class of killer, as Hawley’s show tracks various infestations of extremely hostile alien life into Earth’s biosphere after the universe’s most dangerous cargo ship crash lands on a terrestrial city. Dinklage isn’t just guest-starring, either: Although plot details about the season, and his role in it, are being kept tightly under wraps, the role is being described as a series regular gig, joining star Sydney Chandler and the rest of her increasingly terrifying “Lost Boys” for the majority of the season’s run.

Earth debuted last year with a fair amount of fanfare, but some mixed critical reactions: Our own Matt Schimkowitz, in his review of the series’ season one finale, noted that its deliberate efforts to avoid giving its story a human center meant that it was often a mish-mash of “synthetics, trillionaires, and squid monsters, with not much concern for what happens to any of them.” That being said, Dinklage—who’ll pop up on screens soon with his unconventional scarecrow romance movie Wicker—has a noted knack for playing characters who can be both deeply human or completely, terrifyingly sociopathic, so we’ll have our fingers crossed that he can either bring some horror, or some humanity, to the second season of Hawley’s show.