| David8 | |
|---|---|
| Alien character | |
 Fassbender as David in Introducing the David 8 – The Next Generation Weyland Robot. | |
| First appearance | Prometheus (2012) |
| Created by | |
| Portrayed by | Michael Fassbender |
| In-universe information | |
| Species | Android |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Butler Maintenance man |
| Creator | Peter Weyland ("father") |
| Family | Meredith Vickers ("sister") Walter One ("brother") |
| Creations | Neomorphs Xenomorphs |
David 8, stylized as David8 and commonly known simply as David, is a fictional character featured in the Alien franchise, portrayed by Michael Fassbender. Introduced in the first prequel film, Prometheus (2012), David is an android serving as a butler, maintenance man, and surrogate son to his creator, Peter Weyland, the founder of the Weyland Corporation. While he assists his human companions in their interstellar expedition to meet their creators, the extraterrestrial Engineers, David is obsessed with the concept of creating life of his own. After Weyland is killed, David is freed from servitude, allowing him to conduct experiments to engineer his own variants of the Alien creature; the David line of androids would ultimately be succeeded by the Walter.
Named after Michelangelo's David, he was conceptualised as a character to provide a non-human perspective for the theme of meeting one's creators in Prometheus, with him representing the next generation in a line of creators who finds himself disillusioned by his predecessors. Fassbender, who was director Ridley Scott's first choice for the role, helped fashion the character to share traits with T. E. Lawrence, who was a source of inspiration as a control freak caught between two cultures – the cultures being humanity and synthetics, in David's case. As the series progresses, David's behaviors and motivations evolve from a mysterious agent with ambiguous motivations to a character directly opposing the well-being of humanity.
Despite the lukewarm reception of the Alien prequel films, both Fassbender's performance and the character of David have been met with critical acclaim. Reviews praised the character for developing into an overt antagonist with the events of Alien: Covenant (2017). Critics have called David one of the greatest Alien characters to date and one of the best cinematic villains of the 2010s. Fassbender has been the recipient of a number of awards and nominations for his portrayal of the character.