Picture Credits: Netflix
Ahead of Allen’s global Netflix debut on November 12th, we sat down with Ludo Studio co-founder Daley Pearson to talk about the long road from TV series to feature film, the pop culture myths that shaped the story, and the four-year quest to build the film’s lovable alien.
Ludo Studio is best known as the Brisbane-based company behind Bluey, but with Allen, the studio is taking its biggest swing yet.
The live-action family film is Ludo’s first locally made feature and follows Petey, a Queensland man whose childhood best friend was an alien named Allen, who vanished without saying goodbye. Twenty years later, Allen comes back. Created by Daley Pearson, who co-directs alongside Jeffrey Walker (Apple Cider Vinegar, The Artful Dodger) and co-wrote the screenplay with Sophie Miller (Thou Shalt Not Steal), Allen is unapologetically a riff on the films Pearson grew up on.
In our exclusive chat, Pearson was candid, funny and open about the process of bringing Allen to life. Here’s what he had to say.
From Bluey to Allen: “Everything we make is setting up a new circus”
Pearson co-founded Ludo with Charlie Aspinwall over a decade ago, and he told us the idea of Allen actually predates the studio itself. “We started Ludo, Charlie and I, so people could make their own stuff that felt authored,” Pearson explained. “An author doesn’t have to mean a person. It could mean a group. But it’s more like a singular vision, to sound wanky. That’s what we were excited about. And Allen existed before we started Ludo, so that was like 11 years ago or whatever.”
The studio started with small, weird projects on small budgets, picked up two Emmys in quick succession, and slowly earned the trust to take bigger swings. That started with Bluey alongside creator Joe Brumm, then Robbie Hood with Dylan River and Thou Shalt Not Steal with Sophie Miller. Pearson also wrote an early 30-page draft of what became the beloved horror monster hit Talk to Me, though he’s quick to credit Danny and Michael Philippou: “It’s their film, it’s absolutely their film.” All the while, Allen stayed “in my pocket.”
“It was so crunched at Ludo that we didn’t even have a chance to figure out how we could make something like that,” he said. “This was probably the first time in 10, 11 years where it felt like we had the trust to make something like this, but also we had the decks cleared, for me personally, to concentrate on something for a little while.”
And no, he says, Bluey‘s success doesn’t mean Ludo gets a free pass: “I do understand the perception that if you have something successful, it may be easier. And maybe it is and I don’t realize it, but it really feels like everything we make is setting up a new circus.”
“It’s all about the story, the characters, and the chemistry between the people making it. You have to prove yourself every time, which, rightly so.”
Allen. Josh Helman, TJ Power, Charlotte Nicdao and Allen in Allen. Cr. Netflix © 2026.
A TV series on “very polite pause”
Allen didn’t start life as a movie. It was originally developed at Netflix as a series, which Pearson says was the only home willing to take a risk on something “a bit ridiculous.” “Just before it got going, I assume it was a bit too much money. It was not only a big idea, it was turned into a bigger idea by a TV series,” he said. “Then they put it on very polite pause, which to me felt like, oh yeah, that’s very polite, but we’re breaking up. But they really had these heroes there and champions who believed in it. It always was a feature film in my head. The TV just felt right at that time.” Turning roughly eight episodes into a single film turned out to be anything but a cut-and-paste job. “I thought, well, we can just cut this and stick it together with sticky tape,” he laughed. “It just became obvious you can’t do that. We really did need to throw everything out and totally start writing again, genuinely.”
“At first I was very greedy. I was like, well, this will fit here. Once I got over the hump of not trying to pull the best bits from the TV series into it, bits of it did naturally start to come in.” Still, there are scenes he’s left behind: “I always wake up at night thinking about that stuff, the stuff you didn’t do.”
Allen. TJ Power and Allen in Allen. Cr. Netflix © 2026.
E.T., Free Willy, Billy Joel and Predator
At its core, Pearson says, Allen is about the myths a generation grew up on, and about what happens when something knocks you out of childhood. “E.T. is a myth now, or Free Willy, all those films. To me, it’s as much Free Willy as it is Billy Joel, as it is Predator, as it is a Michael Jackson song,” he said. “There was something exciting about using the colors of that, and we’re getting wankier by the second, to tell a story about letting go of the things that you can’t let go of.”
The film is rooted in a deeply personal loss. Pearson lost his brother when he was 13, and in the film’s press notes he reflects that he has spent much of his life “trying to get back to the person I was before that happened.”
But he’s keen for Allen to speak to anyone who has had their childhood interrupted, whether through divorce, a move, or something smaller. “A guy loses a little alien, which is obviously a metaphor for my personal one, but anyone else’s too,” he said. “We didn’t want to tell a story of ‘you better grow up.’ We also didn’t want to tell a story of ‘childhood’s great, be free forever.’ Only a Sith deals in absolutes. We hope it’s a character who learns to hold on to responsibility and wonder at the same time.”
Picture Credit: Netflix
Why Allen had to be made in Queensland (and what on earth are Cheezels?)
Pearson could have set the film almost anywhere, but making it in his hometown of Coolum, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, was a deliberate choice, inspired in part by the global success of homegrown hits like Talk to Me and Bluey.
Filming took place along the southeast Queensland coast, including Coolum, Redcliffe, Scarborough and the Gold Coast’s Miami Beach. “There’s not that many stories in the world in terms of the DNA of them,” he said. “Putting it in a different place and making the character really from that place, everything refreshes. What’s old is new again.”
“You listen to these old songs, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, so much that you forget how great they are. Telling these stories with a different accent, different people, a different location, it feels fresh and fun again.” He pointed to the Wellington comedies of Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi as a model: “You could do Lost Boys, but in Wellington, and use the familiarity of those characters and story to make it totally fun and different.”
The desinct Aussie nature of the movie continues into minor things including Cheezels (which play an important part throughout) which is brand new to me as a Brit and someone who has not visited the land down under.
Allen with Cheezels (and a very well behaved dog!)
Building Allen: four years, a failed animatronic, and up to ten puppeteers
One of the most striking things about Allen is how much of its alien we actually get to see, often in full daylight rather than lurking in shadow. Pearson admits that wasn’t the original plan. “I definitely started out planning we’ll just shoot him hiding behind bookshelves and stuff,” he said, citing films like Harry and the Hendersons.
“Then we sort of said, well, let’s do one like the best. And it did dawn on us how ambitious that was.” “And additionally, we wanted to make it in our hometown. You don’t just go to the best people in the world, you have to find or become the best people in the world here.”
That meant teaming with Steve Boyle of Formation Effects, a creature veteran usually found in horror territory. “He just finished up making snakes for Anaconda and all sorts of terrible, horrible stuff that’s brilliant,” Pearson said. “This was probably his first very cute character.”
Picture Credit: Netflix
Allen was designed and built over three to four years, originally as an animatronic. Then came a major test with Netflix. “It felt like you’re building a plane and saying it’ll take off, and it doesn’t take off. We built this animatronic like a Howard Hughes thing, the goose will fly. And it didn’t fly,” he said. “He was too fine a character, too small and delicate, and the animatronics made him too severe.” The team pivoted to puppetry, with anywhere from two to ten puppeteers operating Allen at any given time.
The brief, Pearson says, was for Allen to feel like “a really brilliant puppet.” “The dream was that this film felt handmade, that it had a few cracks and sticky tape on it, and felt warm,” he explained. “But eventually, those old tricks we grew up on, feet tinkering around, hiding behind a bookshelf, an eye in a fishbowl, he had to be the T-Rex in broad daylight eating the Gallimimus. It felt like 2026. We couldn’t get past the midpoint without saying, no, he’s just sitting in the living room. That’s what’s fun and funny.” It was a nerve-wracking call. “It felt really scary and vulnerable to decide that, almost in pre-production, because it could have been very, very, very bad.”
The baton then passed to VFX supervisor Jordan McInnes and the team at Alt.VFX, and what followed caught even Pearson off guard. “We made a film with a puppet, and then it felt like we were making an animated film for a year and a half afterwards,” he said. “I think the smarter people at Netflix and Jeffrey Walker, my co-director, knew, and maybe I didn’t fully appreciate the ambition of it. We didn’t replace the puppet totally. There’s some full replacement, but there’s a lot of complementary work throughout.”
For the full story of Allen’s creation, from the gecko-inspired design to the eight puppets and the move to digital, read our deep dive on how Ludo Studio made Allen.
Allen. TJ Power in Allen. Cr. Netflix © 2026.
Having a physical Allen on set clearly paid off for young star TJ Power, whose performance carries a real sense of connection. Pearson, though, admits he may have got a little too into it. “I got in trouble on set, because I would sit beside the puppet and read Allen’s lines to TJ,” he laughed. “Eventually I got a note from Geoff Lamb, our editor, who’s brilliant, he cut Talk to Me, saying, could you stop f***ing talking over TJ’s lines? I guess I’m an actor too. And TJ eventually said, yeah, it probably would help if you didn’t talk over my lines.”
“He’s a kid, he’s so open with wonder and so lovely,” Pearson added. “It’s very lovely to hear that it came out all right, despite my best efforts to ruin it.”
For all the years that went into it, Pearson remains refreshingly modest about how Allen will land. “Whether it’s good or not, it’s always up to the audience,” he said. “We love our stuff, everything we make, and you never know.”
Allen premieres globally on Netflix on Thursday, November 12th, 2026.