Andy Weir Gives Update on Artemis Movie and Why He Wants Jenna Ortega to Play Jazz
Exclusive: Andy Weir explains the status of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Artemis adaptation, and why Jenna Ortega might be "pretty cool" for Jazz.
If critics are to be believed (including this one), then both films adapted from sci-fi author Andy Weir’s bestselling books have been absolute winners. A decade later, Ridley Scott’s interpretation of Weir’s first novel, The Martian, is considered a modern classic of grounded science fiction storytelling. Meanwhile this week’s Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling is receiving a near rapturous reception among critics and the earliest audiences.
Yet there is another book, one that Weir wrote between those two stories which hasn’t been adapted. Although it isn’t from a lack of trying. In some ways the most pulpy of Weir’s star-gazing stories, Artemis debuted on the New York Times bestseller list in 2017 where it introduced the world to Jasmine Bashara (“Jazz” to her friends), a young woman who despite being born in Saudi Arabia during the 2070s grew up since childhood on Artemis, the first and only city on the Moon.
Imagining the Moon as the ultimate tourist destination for the elite and starstruck, Artemis painstakingly speculates on what it would take to set up a permanent colony on our natural satellite, as well as how quickly an underworld of smuggling, vice, and otherwise ill-gotten criminality could spring up there. Or as Jazz might call it… a living.
The movie made a splash in Hollywood before it was published, with 20th Century Fox snatching up the movie rights on the heels of The Martian being a success for the studio. Furthermore, future Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were tapped to helm the picture, with screenwriter Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Tomb Raider, Amazon’s Fallout) hired to write. However, a lot quickly changed afterward, including Disney buying Fox, and Lord and Miller parting ways with the Mouse House on Solo. In the aftermath, there hasn’t been much public movement on Artemis, which author Weir points to when updating us on the project earlier this month.
“I guess it’s probably on the backburner somewhere. I wouldn’t hold my breath for it,” Weir all but sighs. Yet in the same beat, he suggests he hasn’t given up hope for Artemis. “I know Lord and Miller have some really good ideas for it. I think it comes down more to, can we get someone to give us a big pile of money to make it?”
Project Hail Mary might very well be a good launchpad for the appeal since, like The Martian in the 2010s, it’s an original story steeped in relatively serious, “hard” sci-fi. And as Weir confides, he likes the contrast between Jazz and The Martian’s Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon in the movie) and Gosling’s Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary.
“They’re all different,” Weir explains. “Like you can almost not call Mark a hero. He just is a guy who didn’t want to die. He didn’t save anyone… and Jasmine chose heroism kind of toward the end to undo a problem that she herself had created. And then Ryland is actually going out there and trying to save the entire human race, but would rather not be doing it. So they each have their own little way of backing into heroism.”
With that said, Weir seems intrigued when imagining who might play Jazz in a potential Artemis movie.
“That’s a tough call,” Weir muses. “I mean, it’d be pretty cool—and I have no say in any of this—but if someone like Jenna Ortega would do it. It would be pretty cool. Something like that.”
Jenna Ortega would definitely seem to continue the trend of Weir protagonists making juicy vehicles for modern stars, with Ortega coming off the continued success of Wednesday last year. Granted, Jazz is half-Saudi in the book. Still, Amazon’s audio book production of Artemis gained a lot of fanfare from listeners when it cast Rosario Dawson as the narrator of Artemis (and thus the voice of Jazz).
Whether Ortega or another star books a trip to Weir’s Artemis anytime soon remains to be seen, but if Project Hail Mary works for audiences, Lord, Miller, and Weir will now have a track record with getting original sci-fi off the ground in this decade.
Project Hail Mary opens on Friday, March 20.