Sometimes it's good to feel bad
Brave New World actor Ehrenreich recommends leaning into the discomfort
Please forgive Alden Ehrenreich if he's a little disoriented. After all, the actor has spent the past few years living in a far-off galaxy and in a futuristic dystopia — first as Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story, and now as John the Savage in an adaptation of Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World.
“My whole vision of reality after doing Solo and then this back-toback has just gotten so warped,” says Ehrenreich, laughing.
Still, wherever there are humans, there are human problems — and we're tuning in to see what happens when those problems are taken to extremes.
This version of Brave New World, airing on Showcase and streaming on Peacock in the U.S., follows the success of fellow dystopian adaptation The Handmaid's Tale, based on Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel and streaming on Hulu and Crave.
In Brave New World, the government tidies human messiness by engineering its citizens into a strict social hierarchy. It controls relationships, privacy, money and the historical record. But Ehrenreich's character, John the Savage, pushes back.
“When there's an uprising at the beginning of the season, it's about some of the same feelings and movements and things going on in the world now,” says Ehrenreich.
“I'm really glad that I'm releasing something that genuinely feels interested in what the world is like and what our lives are like. What it means to be a human being at this time, even though it's based on an older book.”
Key phrase there: “Based on.” While the show echoes the book in many ways, there are differences.
“More than anything, I was kind of upset by the treatment of Lenina in the book,” executive producer Grant Morrison told Cinemablend, referring to the story's seductive vaccination worker.
“In the book, she suffers a pretty horrible fate for no good reason. And we felt that we wanted to make Lenina the central character in the whole thing. And the whole notion for me was about what can this young woman ... (do).”
“There are some things that didn't age well and needed to be updated,” says Ehrenreich.
“The danger sometimes, especially with something beloved, is that you can be too loyal to it and the story isn't put into a structure that gives you the same emotions you get from reading it. This series keeps the emotional and philosophical essence of the book intact.”
With widespread unrest now in the world — including a global racial reckoning, the pandemic and fallout from the #Metoo movement — viewers might want to dull reality with escapism.
But Ehrenreich recommends leaning into the discomfort.
“What happens when all those bad feelings are turned off? To put it simply, we're just less human when there are parts of us that we don't accept,” says Ehrenreich. “We're cutting ourselves off from one thing and we don't realize that we might be cutting ourselves off from three things. Our rage or anxiety might be connected to some amazing gifts or sensitivities or powers or insight, and you feel less than whole as a result.”