This article contains spoilers from Alien: Earth episode 4, "Observation."

You may have not anticipated a future reality in which the true star of Alien: Earth would turn out to be a sheep, but as for Timothy Olyphant and his colleagues on set? "We all saw it," the actor behind the synth Kirsh tells Entertainment Weekly.

According to Olyphant, the crew made custom shirts. "And you know who's on the front of that shirt? That f---ing sheep," he says. "We got shirts with that sheep and his big fricking eyeball."

If you've seen up to episode 4 of Alien: Earth, you know exactly what Olyphant is talking about.

While studying the extraterrestrials they acquired from a crashed Weyland-Yutani spacecraft, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and his associates place the giant tentacled eyeball in the same holding cell as a sheep test subject to observe their exchange. They then watch with a mixture of horror and fascination as the alien rips out the animal's eyeball and places itself inside the empty socket, using its squid-like tendrils to control its body like a robot by connecting with its muscular and nervous systems.

In short, "I was a big fan of the sheep," Olyphant remarks.

The sheep alone, serving a judgmental face in reaction to various moments in early episodes, was already slowly turning into something of an internet favorite. Now with the alien using the sheep to run amuck, we can safely say there'll be more to love when new episodes debut Tuesday nights.

Showrunner Noah Hawley offers better insight into the creation of the sheep's behind-the-scene costar, the alien eyeball.

"Playing into those genetic revulsions that we have about parasites, definitely anything that interacts with our face is really a no-go," he says. "So the idea of the facehugger, the idea that not only does it suffocate you and wrap itself around your face, it also penetrates you and puts something down your throat, and then it's breathing for you and providing you nutrition to make you into a host -- all of that is terrible, right? So I just moved up two holes. I just went up to the eye."

Hawley points out they haven't explicitly established whether any part of the infected host could still be conscious to know what the alien is doing to its body, but that's part of the fear factor.

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"I really get freaked out by the idea of general anesthesia," he explains. "The idea that my body is gonna be moving through the world, but I'm not gonna have any memory of it or any agency over myself is really discomforting to me. This is a more extreme version of that where, in that moment of violation, you just stop being you, but you're still walking around, you're still doing stuff."

Now we just need a Funko Pop or plushie of the sheep with the engorged alien eye.

"I'm telling you, man, this is one of those gigs where it's hard to demand the millions of dollars that you'd like to get because the monster is No. 1 on the call sheet," Olyphant jokes. "He's not even on the call sheet, but, you know, he's the star."