“I think once you ingest the source material and it’s in you, the best way to serve it is just to give yourself to it and make it as personal as you possibly can.”
Alden Ehrenreich on playing John the Savage in the Peacock series adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”
ALDEN EHRENREICH IS no stranger to stepping into the worlds of iconic intellectual property: In 2013 he starred in the big-screen adaptation of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s “Beautiful Creatures,” and in 2018 he joined the “Star Wars” universe as Han Solo in “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” Now comes his first television series regular role as John the Savage in David Wiener’s take on Aldous Huxley’s early 1930s novel “Brave New World,” which premieres July 15 on Peacock. How does having source material affect your interest in a project and what you want to do with a character? You have a sense of the world from the start, and you know that there’s a level of philosophical depth and emotional depth to it from the book. But I think once you ingest the source material and it’s in you, the best way to serve it is just to give yourself to it and make it as personal to you as you possibly can and trust that it will be more alive as a result. How does your John the Savage compare to the book’s? In the book, John has, from Shakespeare, this romantic and large sense of what life should be and that it’s very much about love and feelings and emotional things and depth. And that looks different in the series, but it’s still the same plight and the same cause. For me that was really exciting, not entirely unlike “Solo,” where you’re the character in the midst of this enormous and incredibly dominant and overbearing system and you have a feeling or a belief that you’re fighting to get across. What informed the way you wanted John to move through the world? It’s all about the people around him — the way in which the relationships he’s in are completely different. He goes from being totally the bullied runt of this town and a low man on the totem pole and everyone around him has a kind of power over him, and then he gets to the new world and everybody’s fascinated by him. That happens in the middle of the season, and that got really fun, where he realizes, “I can start doing things I’ve always dreamt of doing.” The show expands on some of the novel’s themes and fears about society, given where the world is today. What piece of it do you find to be the most cautionary tale? [David] told me this story about George Orwell, who was a student of Aldous Huxley, and Huxley wrote him a letter after [Orwell] wrote “1984” saying basically, “Great job with the book — it’s a great book — but my concern for the future is not that there’s going to be an overtly totalitarian Big Brother that takes us and controls us. I’m concerned that we’re going to be so lazy and unaware, and our servitude is going to be made so comfortable and convenient for us, that we are going to happily and willingly recline into their hands.” And that resonates way more to me every time I click “yes” to some [online] permission I’m being asked to click to — that I don’t read at all because I don’t have the time or patience to read through the thing. That’s a vision of the world to me that feels very dangerous.