Brave New World presented quite the challenge for its stars—and that's exactly why they wanted to do the series.
An adaption of the 1932 book of the same name by Aldous Huxley, the Peacock original series explores a dystopian future where emotions are regulated, and the citizens are engineered and adhere to a social hierarchy. But what happens if they don't? What happens when an X-factor, John the Savage (Alden Ehrenreich), shakes up the only world they've known and introduces concepts that seem so simple to viewers, regular ole emotional humans?
"From the moment I read the first script, I just had a gut feeling that there was going to be a sort of—a giant amount of space to explore. This world felt really huge, but there was also an intimacy within Lenina that felt—that's infinite too, right? The insides of us," Jessica Brown Findlay told E! News.
"I loved that. I just fell in love with it really, really quickly and therefore became desperate to play the part, which is always heartbreaking when you don't get it, but I was so lucky to get this opportunity. I just adored it, it was great," she continued.
Findlay said it was "interesting" to have to suppress the emotions she, as a person, have known her whole life to play a character who was just discovering them. "They've all been unraveled and trying to be rewired. But there is something in us, in humanity—we're always going to feel emotions and we can't really numb that out," she said.
The story of Brave New World has been told many times before since the 1932 publication, and the Peacock series does change up the story quite a bit. Ehrenreich shared his thoughts on people who may be turned off by the changes to the subject matter.
"If you're capturing the real spirit of it, and the real intelligence of it, I think in a way the show becomes a better delivery system for us to understand the present moment in certain ways because it's designed to do that. They're just two different experiences," Ehrenreich said. "East of Eden is one of my favorite films and the book is my favorite novel, and they are completely different. I think what's great about the show is it brings all of these wonderful philosophical ideas and questions to vivid life."
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Brave New World, which also stars Harry Lloyd, Demi Moore, Hannah John-Kamen, Joseph Morgan, Sen Mitsuji and Nina Sosanya, premieres Wednesday, July 15 on Peacock.
(E! and Peacock are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)