The much-shuffled Brave New World TV series just got a big boost with some major casting news: Alden Ehrenreich, last seen piloting the Millennium Falcon in Solo: A Star Wars Story, will play lead character John the Savage, the outsider who upsets the status quo in the latest take on Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian novel.
Just a few months back, it seemed that this Brave New World adaptation would be heading to the USA Network, but Deadline, which shared the news about Ehrenreich’s casting, has an update on that front, too, noting that the show—originally planned for Syfy before getting a series pickup at USA—“is now rumoured as a potential flagship series for the NBCU streaming platform, set to launch in 2020.”
There’s no word on whether or not the series—which will be written by David Wiener (who will also showrun), Grant Morrison, and Bryan Taylor; Wiener and Morrison will also executive produce along with Amblin TV—will update the setting of Huxley’s 1932 novel about a utopia that’s not quite as utopian as it seems (are they ever?). But even if it doesn’t, Brave New World’s futuristic themes (much like those of George Orwell’s 1984) still have a way of feeling awfully contemporary.
With Ehrenreich aboard, we’ll no doubt be hearing even more about Brave New World as it moves toward what sounds like a streaming debut, likely sometime next year.