Big Brother is coming … and he’ll be voiced by Venom. Which is to say, Tom Hardy is among the outstanding cast in Audible’s latest audio drama, which comes from director Destiny Ekaragha (The End of the F***ing World) and playwright Joe White (Blackout Songs).
Hardy will be joined by Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man) as Winston, Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) as Julia, and Andrew Scott (All of Us Strangers) as O’Brien.
There is a certain irony in Audible—an Amazon company—tackling George Orwell’s famous dystopia, not least because once upon a time, Amazon deleted copies of this very book from its customers’ Kindles. (Amazon did this because the ebooks that it had sold to people were provided by a company that did not actually have the rights to the book, which might make a person wonder why said company was allowed to sell the unlicensed books on Amazon in the first place. But I digress.)
This 1984 is “officially authorized and endorsed by the Orwell estate,” according to Variety. Here is how Audible summarizes it:
It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.
The rest of the truly excellent cast includes Natasia Demetriou (What We Do in the Shadows), Katie Leung (The Peripheral), Chukwudi Iwuji (Peacemaker), Alex Lawther (Andor), Romesh Ranganathan (Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget), and Francesca Mills (The Witcher: Blood Origin).
Big Brother gets uploaded April 4, 2024. You can listen to the trailer here.
