Brave New World: Alden Ehrenreich lands role in TV adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s classic novel

It will be Ehrenreich’s first series-regular role

Alden Ehrenreich (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Star Wars actor Alden Ehrenreich has been cast in a televised adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World.

The majority of the story takes place in the fictional World State, where citizens are born from artificial wombs and are controlled by a domineering upper class.

Ehrenreich will play John the Savage, who escapes a hellish version of London to the so-called Savage Lands. From there, he threatens to disrupt the World State’s apparent utopian harmony.

The project – headed up by Universal Content Productions and Amblin Television – received a straight-to-series order from USA Network in February. The series will have 10 episodes.

This is Ehrenreich’s first series-regular role. The 29-year-old is best known for playing Hans Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. His other credits include Beautiful Creatures (2013), Blue Jasmine (2013) and The Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016).

TV channel Syfy, owned by NBCUniversal, first had the rights for development in 2015, with Les Bohem on board as writer. Homecoming showrunner David Wiener joined the project in 2018 and will now write the series alongside Grant Morrison and Brian Taylor.

Wiener and Morrison will be executive producers on the series, as will Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey of Amblin, and Owen Harris, the director of two Black Mirror episodes.

Brave New World was first published in 1932. The novel was adapted and made into feature films in 1980 and 1998.