Since releasing in April, has enthralled both longtime audio fans and first-time listeners with its gripping soundscape and iconic performances, creating a thrilling new take on the dystopian classic. Its most incendiary scenes—like the passionate trysts of Andrew Garfield's Winston and Cynthia Erivo's Julia, and Winston's torture at the hands of Andrew Scott's terrifying (and terrifyingly sexy) O'Brien—set the internet alight, all while Orwell's novel proved its timeless resonance for maybe the millionth time. In this recorded conversation, playwright Joe White speaks to Audible's Director of Scripted Drama & Original Fiction Robin Morgan-Bentley about adapting the novel to audio, giving listeners an exclusive peek at how the dramatization, sound design, and celebrity cast came together for a thrilling Audible production unlike any other.
Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.
Robin Morgan-Bentley: Hi, Joe.
Joe White: Hi, Robin.
RMB: We talk a lot, we have talked a lot, but this time we’re doing it in front of microphones. I guess let’s introduce ourselves to start off. I’m Robin Morgan-Bentley. I'm commissioning editor at Audible for scripted drama and original fiction. And you are?
JW: I'm Joe White. I'm the writer of 1984.
RMB: Brilliant. When did 1984 come out, maybe about a month ago now? It's been out for a month. It's gone really well, loads of people have listened to it, the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. But let's wind the clock back to, I guess, 18 months, two years ago, when I first called you and said, "Hey, what do you think about 1984? Would you be up for thinking about how we might adapt it for audio?" What was your reaction?
JW: So, you called me in, yeah, January 2023, last year, and I'd just read it the summer before for the first time. I hadn't read it like a lot of my peers and friends at school and people like that who I'd grown up with. So, it was really fresh in my mind, actually, and I was so excited, as I was reading it even. It was like a holiday read—I mean, great choice for a holiday read—but I was thinking as I was reading it, because I just don't ever stop thinking about ways in which this could be a fantastic TV series, or I wish there was a new film of this, or an audio series. So, it was kind of strange that six months later you called me and was like, "How do you feel about 1984?" I have a message, actually, that I sent saying, "I'd eat my own glasses to do it."
I remember the turnaround was really quick. You were like, "There is a slight catch, we have to get first draft done by May," or something. I had a few months, and I was like, "Eh, don't worry about it, I can do it." And I just panicked. I did the swan thing of completely panicking underneath. So, read it a couple more times, noted it, just went through it and just sort of absorbed. I read it, literally finished it, started again, and then just sort of had to put it down for a minute, and then start.
The first port of call, really, was moving the narrative from third person to first person. I wanted it to be within Winston's head. I wanted us to have one sole narrator who was guiding us through it. So, I had to shift sort of Orwell's third person narrator into Winston's voice, which mostly actually syncs up. There's a sardonic sort of, very dry quality to his voice that's sort of both funny and sometimes quite bleak. They share a sort of similar tone, so it wasn't too hard.
And then, to be honest, as soon as I had the idea of Winston's internal monologue and the way in which he thought about the world compared to what he did externally in the world and how fun that was to play with, the next thing that came to me that was really exciting was, “Well, who else's voice can get into that head, into that space?” And the brilliant thing about audio is it's so intimate and immersive anyway, you're literally in some, you know, if someone's wearing headphones, you're very close to them. You're sometimes in their head, like physically, literally. So, there's a very intimate relationship you can build with the listener. And it can be somebody that's complicit with the narrator, or who's a confidante who can see all of their most intimate moments—we have some very intimate moments in this story—and hear their most intimate thoughts, which in this world can get you killed. So, you're sharing those secrets with them, which are dangerous, with Winston.
So, after I established that, it was just really exciting to think about, “Well, who else can get in?” And O'Brien, who's in the novel, who Winston talks about being able to feel like he's in his head, he feels like he can hear him sometimes, and then of course Julia, who we go on to meet, the dark-haired girl. It was really fun playing with whose voice, then, Winston lets in and who actually even begins to take over.
RMB: I was conscious that it was quite a big ask, right? Because it's kind of notoriously difficult to adapt, and I think part of that is what you've just mentioned: How do you bring into audio, without visuals, this kind of internal world, and also this world that has its own rules? You know, when you think of 1984, you think of screens, you think of big eyes, you think of a lot of visual things. So, was there any part of you that was like, "I can't do this"?
JW: Not really. I've grown up with audio drama, and I was listening as a kid to things. And I always found that, and I've experienced it as a writer as well, that actually the more visual you write, the more visual I write, you can set up so many visual elements through dialogue but also through sound, sound design, and just descriptions of what's going on. The more visual they are, the more exciting, actually, and the audience fills in so many gaps.
I think there's an element of people coming to this story with an idea of those visuals as well. I think it helps. I think we've seen dystopias that have come from 1984, that started with 1984, but have come out of that, like Blade Runner or those sort of landscapes that feel very of this world. But really, because we have that narrator tool, that device, and Winston is talking to us as the future, he's doing a lot of expositional work, and really the bulk of that is in part one, and from there it sort of takes care of itself.
Establishing the world is difficult, but actually making it really active and visual in a way, helping the audience through this story, through sound world, moving between things like Winston in his flat and then the Thought Police who are watching him in their mass surveillance room, it's sort of really clear. You don't have to do that much. We hear all these voices watching various screens, watching people all over this bizarre place that is Airstrip One, formerly London. You can do a lot of work, actually, with just building those sort of worlds through voices, through sound worlds, through music. It can influence so much, actually.
“It sets the page on fire, still. How prescient it is, how much of a foreboding warning it is to us as a society.”
RMB: One thing we talked about early on, and throughout, that I was really keen on was simplicity, right? I always say it's so important in audio drama, and for audiobooks in general, to keep things simple, to spoon-feed the listener a little bit. We can imagine that an audiobook listener maybe is listening with 50 percent of their attention, and it's not the same as sitting in the theater or sitting in the cinema where you're in a dark room and your eyes are busy. So, that sense of simplicity, how did you build that into this kind of complex world-building?
JW: It's a good question. To be honest—you know that show, what was that show on Channel 5, that used to be like “Behind the Magician's Secrets,” where he reveals his secrets? I feel like I'm slightly betraying loads of writers by talking about technique. But this is one that I definitely know is true. There's this one that I read, there's a book called , which a lot of people refer to, and some of that's useful and some of it's not. But there's one thing I remember talking about, which was this technique called “the pope in the pool,” which was somebody needed some exposition but it was really clunky and it was like, “How do we get this information to an audience without just literally telling them and it sounding like that?” And they were like, "Oh, distract at the same time. Have a pope doing lengths in the pool whilst two people are talking." I don't know why that was a scene in a film, but it was the reference that this guy was using.
And I have thought about that ever since, that in these scenes where you need world-building and loads of exposition, actually the best thing to do is sort of displace it. So, Winston can tell us some things, and we can get some things really clearly, like handholding “Here's our guide into the world,” but other elements you can displace into just little scenes that are sort of actually telling you a lot, but something else is going on.
So when we go into the Ministry of Truth, for example, for the first time, we're getting this sort of cross-section of the whole building where we're seeing the Fiction Department, where the novel-writing machines are broken down, and there's Pornosec, and there's the surveillance room, and then there's the Records Department where Winston works and he's correcting all of history. In that scene, you're kind of doing a lot of world-building in one building, if that makes sense? We're doing a lot of outside world, but contained in one place. But in each of those, something's going on. So, the novel-writing machine's broken, Pornosec having a fight about spanking stories, needs a new ending. Surveillance room, we get loads of voices in all these places that we're dipping into that their people are watching on screens. And then you've got Winston working in his little cubicle and he's talking about his relationship with the people around him, and then that gets interrupted by Two Minutes Hate.
It's about breaking it down into those units, I think. Scale is something that's so difficult to just get outright, and actually going too big, particularly just being told something about a world, it's quite hard to be evocative. It's sometimes so much more interesting to go really in on a microcosm of that world and think about the micro, but make that really interesting and build in through other places the exposition.
RMB: Right. “Show, don’t tell” is the other thing that people always say.
JW: Yeah, absolutely. Sneak it in. It's sort of sneaking in the world-building. And if you notice, the first part of 1984 has a lot of it because it needs to, you need to establish so much. And really, definitely from part three onwards, we're sort of into the bulk of the emotional storyline with Julia and O'Brien, and we need less spoon-fed to us as an audience at that point.
RMB: Another thing that we had to think about in the process was kind of finding that line between being true to the original book, because we had the Orwell estate on board and consulting on our scripts, but also giving it a reason to exist. I always feel with adaptations, there needs to be a reason why we're making this thing. There's no point in just making the same thing again. Can you give me some examples of where that line came up in conversations?
JW: Yeah. I mean, look, I remember reading it, as I said, a couple summers ago, and it sets the page on fire, still. How prescient it is, how much of a foreboding warning it is to us as a society. You can't help but read the Two Minutes Hate and think of Twitter or any sort of social media that's like a bin fire where people just go and scream for a bit. It's everywhere, the feeling of surveillance states, the spread of misinformation, of very high-tech, now very terrifying, AI deepfake stuff that can distort reality. It's all there in this novel. And so in terms of a reason to do it, it still feels like it's right at our doorsteps and it feels like this is a story that could be right now. And loads of the reactions to it have reflected that, that this reflects a paranoia of the age and the moment. And tapping into that was important.
So, I'd say that there was a lot of focus on those elements, that definitely you can use Winston's internal voice to really think about that paranoia and reflect it. But it was also really exciting for me in dramatizing it to see the things that Orwell had written but maybe not gone into so much detail in the novel, and then to try and dramatize that. It's sort of what I was talking about before: Find what he's talking about and make it active in microcosm, find some of those big-world things, and try and find an actual focal point. So, things like the world around us, of like hangings. I was scared to do it, but we opened—the famous opening, the clock struck 13 as Winston made his way back to write his book—we changed. We moved it to, he's in a playground, in a park, just having bought the book as this weapon he's going to use against the Party, and he witnesses a hanging in the park that loads of kids come and see and celebrate, and it's this immediate introduction to a very dark, terrifying new world.
But that's a scary shift, because people love the original. It's talked about in the book, everything that I've written about comes from source material. I dramatized a scene on the train where he says, in the book, it's just a reference to him sitting with the proles in the prole carriage because he could lay low, and I was like, “That's too good. That's too good a scene not to have, to show.” And it also speaks to me, my reaction to perhaps Orwell and of the time's thoughts about proletariat, I guess the working class, that I didn't want them to be these sort of caricature, background characters. I mean, they are, they can't be foregrounded too much, but I wanted them to be funny and intelligent and have actually political views of their own. They have a nickname rather than just being called the proles by the Party. They have a nickname for the Ingsoc as well.
I wanted to just put in these tiny things that work. They're new, but they sort of emerge from the source text. You have to always respect where things have come from, the original story, and it's so loved that you can't mess around with it. But I think you can take inspiration from those moments that Orwell hints at, that actually feel really dramatically exciting.
RMB: We talked a lot about Julia, didn't we? Because maybe this is controversial, but there's definitely misogyny in the original book and the way Julia is portrayed. And I felt that, “What's that going to sound like for a 2024 audience?” How did you tackle that?
JW: Yeah, it was one of the first big goals that I pitched to you in terms of the rewrite, was to make Julia and Winston's love feel authentic, number one, because I've thought that that's where the real stakes of the story was emotionally, that you can actually alter somebody's, maybe, attitude or thoughts on certain things but how do you alter someone's love? Like, that's such a huge, high-stakes thing to hold onto, so that was really important.
But then, yes, I want to separate Orwell from the narrator's voice in that story, but there's almost a disdain for women in that story, actually. There's a lot of violence towards women. Winston's ex-wife is talked about absolutely terribly, and there's an interaction with an elderly prostitute that he partly projects his mum and partly his ex-wife on, it's really odd. You know, it's chewy stuff, and it's interesting. I guess there is an interesting sort of character element to Winston, why he reacts to women and love in that way, but it wasn't right for this telling. I couldn't see a way that Julia could love a man who had that sort of violence running through him, and misogyny. So, I just took it out.
And Julia herself had to become way more active. I think that it's a mystery that she is in love with Winston. It's sort of a twist in the story. You should not see that coming, what she's written down on the note. But I had to try and find something to at least hint at—so it's still a twist, it's still a shock, and it still retains the sort of feeling of the book. Basically I wrote in two other tiny, tiny interactions with Julia in the Ministry where we could just see that she enjoys, first of all, seeing how rattled he is by the world around him, but also sees in him someone who she connects with, someone who she sees herself in in some ways, who doesn't fit in. He's nowhere near as good as her at lying about it and being a good Party member, and she can see it a mile off.
I put in a line about how Winston talks to her about how he can hear O'Brien's voice, and Julia says, "That's what I have with you, I hear your voice." And just these little, tiny things that just help a little bit explain that in a world where love is dangerous, you can face death. We have the first scene, two lovers are being hanged in a park, it's sort of very clearly what the rules of love are. In this world Julia could have loved Winston for just seeing somebody akin to her but not being able to talk about it for a very long time. And it's only when they have these two little interactions that she's starting to get closer to him, she's starting to feel like, “Do you know what? Now's the time to declare it.”
Then I also wanted to make her more active. After their meeting, you know, he calls her a rebel from the waist down. She is sexually active, but she had to be more than that. Her big thing is, “Let's run away, we can escape this. I have technical skills, I work in a factory, I work on the novel-writing machines, I can get a job, I can wear an eye patch, we can get out of here.”
RMB: Right, she initiates all of that.
JW: She initiates all of it. She actually offers him the way. And do you know what? They probably could. Like, who's to say they couldn't have got out and just found a job and laid low, at least had a few more years together. But Winston's got this sort of stubborn, niggling idea that maybe he can seed something that can defeat the Party. And actually I think he convinces her, and then when he does convince her, she's full in. She's the one who goes to O'Brien with him and is like, "I'm with you in this." She's actively rebellious against the Party as well, it's just that she needed to meet Winston to have that, I guess that charge of bigger picture.
RMB: Right, so he's the spark, right?
JW: He's the spark for her, exactly, rather than the other way around, actually.
“You have to always respect where things have come from, the original story, and it's so loved that you can't mess around with it.”
RMB: That sex scene between Winston and Julia, I think one of the reviews, I think from The Guardian, called it “al fresco fun,” which I quite enjoyed. But for their al fresco fun, I remember going through a few drafts of that because I was like, "Come on, let's push it further. I want to see the passion in this writing." We took some risks, right? I remember being slightly worried that A) actors wouldn't want to perform the words, and B) people would find it a bit too shocking. But I'm kind of glad that we did that, right?
JW: I'm so happy. I have a theatrical background, so the idea of writing a sex scene I find a bit difficult because I have to imagine actors onstage doing it. You know, “al fresco fun” to me is a couple of Scotch eggs [laughs]. But I was actually really glad by your sort of provocation to be like, "No, this should be so passionate," and it's so right. We have to really believe that Julia and Winston really want each other. I actually love that Winston can't in that first instance, his body rejects his passion. It doesn't understand it anymore, it's been trained. He's on the way to being trained out of that love, and he can't help but think about microphones in the trees or who's watching and all that sort of stuff. And it's only Julia making him think about the tangible, the sensory—touch my hand, feel my breast, this is me, I'm here in front of you and I want you—that he can give in and stop thinking for a moment. We actually get rid of the internal voice, and they just experience this very passionate al fresco fun.
RBM: And it was interesting recording it, wasn't it?
JW: It's sort of awkward, but it's sort of amazing, because when you're watching actors in a booth, I remember me and Destiny [Ekaragha] were looking down a lot, just trying to listen, focus on the sound of it rather than watching an actor perform, and I was very happy to look down during the sex scene and just sort of stare at my shoes and awkwardly shuffle. But I remember it being so passionate.
RMB: Well, a bit of a behind-the-scenes secret is that a lot of the actors in this, and particularly the lead actors, performed in isolation. So, Cynthia Erivo, who plays Julia, and Andrew Garfield, who plays Winston, were not in the same room together, in fact not even in the same country together, on different days when they were recording their parts. And I think that's one of the magics of audio storytelling and technology, and the kind of magic that we're able to do in post-production, is I don't think it sounds like they're in separate rooms. But what was funny is watching both of them perform this sex scene on their own, essentially, with stand-in actors, which helped, and then seeing how they could be put together as if they're in the same room. But yeah, the trick is apparently kissing one's own arm. That is the most realistic kissing sound.
JW: Ahh, right. That's how I practiced for years. Yeah, it should be celebrated actually, the fact that that's a way that we make these dramas is through those isolated recordings. Everything in this process has been done sort of in abstract, in a way. You record, particularly those main roles, separately. We do all the sound design separately, the score and everything is done separately. Of course, none of it is together, but it's the way it's edited and stitched and feels seamless. We should hear about that all the time, I think, because it absolutely is magic, it is a feat of amazing editing, sound design, producers who put it all together.
Some of those stage directions, those directions that I write about, like how they found a way to give that a sound world—particularly when Winston's being tortured, pre-Room 101, and we move through time, we move back through all the various things that he's experienced, even the idea of it's almost like he goes underwater with pain, I wrote things like that. And they found a way to make that actual, tangible sound world.
RMB: Big thanks to Nathan Freeman at Granny Eats Wolf who led a team, masterminded the sound design. He's like an unbelievable magician when it comes to audio, right?
JW: Incredible, and nothing felt like too much of an ask, really, in terms of me writing those worlds and those moments. He just seemed to know. I remember, actually, pre-Room 101, there's an electrocution scene that's our viral moment because of the whimpering, which we might touch on, but very briefly, we had this sound design, the thing I'd written for the sound of the electric going through Winston. Nathan was like, "Do you know what I think is more intimidating? It's like a ticking, like a speeding up of a ticking, almost like an MRI machine." And he talked me through what that sound was, and we were like, "Yeah, that's so exciting." So, he's put that with a sort of charge sound effect. His brain just works in that sort of audible way. He thinks about interesting sounds that you wouldn't necessarily pitch with the action. That's what's really exciting as well, it's very clear but sort of surprising.
RMB: Let's talk about how we got to the cast, and huge thanks to Mariele Runacre-Temple, who masterminded that on Audible’s side.
JW: Incredible.
RMB: For me, the most important thing at the outset was finding the right Winston. Winston has so many of the lines in this production, he's the beating heart, he's the everything in this production. I actually think Andrew Garfield was the first person we approached wasn't he?
JW: I think so, and I think as soon as you said his name, I was like, after I got up again [laughing], having fainted for a few minutes, I was like, “There's no one else. I really hope we get him.” It felt like it might be a challenge, but I was so excited, and particularly meeting him, how much he loved the script and the original story, how much prep he'd done, how much thought he'd put into that character and that world. I mean, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was pleasantly surprised. He was so on it and so brilliant, and offered so much in the booth as well. He not just nailed the difference between the sardonic humor in his head and that frustrated, restrained, and terrified person that is living in this world, but also is so naturally funny, sexy as hell. I think he pretty much got everything first take. Like, we very rarely had to, if we ever had to get anything, it wasn't because of acting choices.
RMB: I was really taken aback by the preparation and by the intellectual rigor that he brought to the whole process. He took this thing very seriously, and he had really thought about everything in great detail, which is amazing. I remember this moment, I hope it's okay to talk about this, where he'd gone into the bathroom before a take just to kind of get himself in character, and I imagined him kind of looking into the mirror and sort of becoming Winston. And it's the kind of thing maybe you would expect on a film set or a TV set, but it's that kind of commitment and intensity that I think brings us the fantastic performance that we have, one of the best performances in an audio drama I've ever heard.
JW: Oh, for sure. I feel so lucky to have been a part of it, and been able to just be in there for those three days watching him do it, listening to him do it. And I think you're right, I think there was a lot of emotional strain that he put himself under, particularly in the end part, in the end third of the torture scene in Room 101. I could feel it, it was palpable. I had to go into that booth after they'd recorded Room 101 and be like, "Does anyone need a cup of tea? Are we all right?" Because him and our director, Destiny Ekaragha, who's an incredible director, they by that point had done it all in order, and we got to that point where they'd formed a bond between the two of them, they'd been working very closely and intimately in the booth for three days, and it was a lot to go through. It's a lot to go through watching somebody be tortured and direct someone to be tortured that intensely, and particularly by rats, which Destiny has a phobia. So, it was difficult.
But that's what's so interesting as well about recording in isolation, because we did that one week, and then maybe a couple weeks later, we had Andrew Scott do the same scene, but this time we're in O'Brien's perspective, and it was so interesting watching that change, from us being on the side of the tortured and feeling so intensely sort of emotive because of it, to siding with the torturer and being like, "What else can we do? This is fun.” And watching Andrew Scott enjoy it and making us laugh during it—that was what was so surprising, he made us laugh so many times. His little asides to Martin, you know?
RMB: Oh, my god, my favorite thing in the whole production, yeah. “Martin? Martin?”
JW: “Martin? Martin?” It's like a couple talking about, “Do you want a cup of tea?” But it's about torture, you know, “Can you hand me the syringe, and can you turn the electricity up?” And Andrew Scott, I could tell, was enjoying it. I could tell he was enjoying the sort of slightly heightened camp, like, Machiavellian nature to O'Brien, and the fact that he has a job to do. I think you could see it, that his O'Brien was somebody who not only enjoyed their job but knew that they were really good at it, at breaking people down. So, him enjoying it was O'Brien enjoying it, in a way. And I think it was just so interesting to do that exact same scene twice and see which side we as the director and writer, but hopefully the audience, also are conflicted between, because both of them are great performances. And led to some great whimpering.
RMB: Well, yeah, so I remember when we were thinking about who could play O'Brien, we were quite keen for it to be a hunk basically, right? Because there is something, and I think particularly in your adaptation, where, what is Winston's relationship with O'Brien? Is he a father figure? Does he fancy him a bit, basically? I think we did write homoeroticism into it, right? So I think Andrew seemed like the perfect fit. He's such a seasoned, amazing actor. He's done so much audio drama and radio drama before, and then I think we probably both saw him in Uncle Vanya, which is a one-man play in the West End. It felt like an amazing coup. He just sort of came in, it was less than a day for all his parts, wasn't it? I was just blown away.
JW: Yeah, what an incredible bit of casting that is. Again, credit to Mariele and everybody who helped make that happen. It's hinted at in the novel that there is a strong and intimate bond between these two men, or at least Winston perceives that, and he hears his voice and he's only seen him a handful of times in 12 years. That, to me, there is something of a crush involved in that. When he sees him, he talks about him, all about his physical attributes, and talks about him incredibly favorably, about the way he moves, the way he takes his glasses off his nose and things like that. Winston's watching this guy with such detail, and then starts to hear his voice whispering into his ear. So, it didn't feel too much of a leap for me to suggest that maybe there was some—maybe Winston doesn't even know yet, but there is some sort of feelings towards O'Brien that go beyond him just sort of respecting him and seeing him as unorthodox. It's interesting, we talk about orthodoxy, you know, it's not just orthodoxy in the Party, I think it's orthodox of sexuality, and he sees in O'Brien something that represents something outside of the orthodox, something outside of the norm, and I think that involves being sexually attracted to him.
“I'm going to be writing sexy whimpering into pretty much everything I do now.”
So it’s really interesting that when we have him and Julia having sex for the first time, he asks about Julia, and this is in the book, he asks whether Julia has been with people in the Inner Party, and she says no. And I was just like, “Why has Orwell put that there? Why is he so interested in this sort of rot that is in the Inner Party?” And I was like, “I don't think it's about the Inner Party, I think it's about O'Brien.” So, I put in a line, “Say O'Brien. Say O'Brien,” as they're having sex, and it just sort of ties in this sort of strange, confused, repressed sexual desire towards him as well, that we could then look at in that final scene. I think O'Brien knows that he has a draw, has a pull over Winston. He hugs him. Winston tells him, at least in his head, says, "I love you. I love you." I think he is in love with O'Brien as well.
So it is a sort of weirdly, not quite a love triangle, but kind of something weird. I really enjoy the scene when Julia comes round to O'Brien's flat with Winston, and O'Brien has absolutely zero time for her being there, which is both fun in terms of like, because it can scan as just this was supposed to be a secret meeting about illicit things, or was this supposed to be a bit of a date and I'm really annoyed that you've brought your girlfriend along. And I remember Andrew Scott playing it a little bit like, "Who is this woman you've brought round?" And it was really funny. It's an interesting relationship, that one.
RMB: Well, the internet definitely picked up on it, right? I mean, there was an article about people sharing clips on TikTok and basically getting turned on by the torture scene, right? I don't think any of us expected quite that reaction [laughing].
JW: I can't say that I wrote it with that intention, but I'm going to be writing sexy whimpering into pretty much everything I do now.
RMB: And let's talk about Julia as well. Cynthia Erivo, I think she gives an amazing performance. Again, we're both theater nerds, so I remember seeing Cynthia Erivo on a tour of Sister Act the musical, and thinking like, you know, sometimes you watch a performer and you think, “They've really got the X factor.” She's incredible and brings such freshness to Julia, I think, and again, intelligence. I couldn't believe how intellectually engaged she was. She'd really thought about who Julia was and what Julia means in 2024 in this depiction of 1984.
JW: Yeah, she was amazing casting. I mean, she is a fiercely intelligent woman and I think imbues Julia with that, just by casting, actually, by being Cynthia playing her. But yes, applied so much rigor to the character and thinking about the world. I wish that we could have done even more with going into her backstory, and it would have been so fun to explore that character in even more depth. She came to it with a sort of playful but very intellectual, clear, like, rod through everything of “What is my goal?” Like, “What do I get out of this situation?” She sort of plays her quite like, a bit mercenary in some ways, who is then surprised to be caught up so much with Winston and everything he'd love to do.
Love takes over, basically. I think she's learned a way of being, and then love sort of wobbles her off her axis a bit, which is really exciting to listen to as well.
RMB: Can you tell me a bit about some of the, we call them Easter eggs that you put into the script? Little in-jokes, little things. I saw actually on IMDB someone's picked up on the E.A. Blair thing.
JW: Oh, yeah. So, for those who don't know, people who are basically killed and removed, vaporized they say in 1984, become "unpeople," because every historical record of them is deleted after they are killed, so they never existed. And it was just quite fun, next to Winston there is one of his coworkers is a destroyer of these people, and so it was quite fun going back to her and seeing all the people that we could delete, and one of them is E.A. Blair, and E.A. Blair was George Orwell's name, Eric Arthur Blair. So yeah, there were a few of these little things. I mean, I've killed off friends and exes in that, in the background, which they might hear. My mom was in it.
RMB: Oh god, your mom.
JW: Yeah, she came in and did—my mom has been desperate to do something in my work for ages.
RMB: Jenny White, everyone. Big future for Jenny White.
JW: Agents, snap her up. She's going to be huge. She came in and did the prole quarter sort of stuff. She was a fish seller, which she hated that that was her job title, that's her character name, but I think it's absolutely brilliant. So, you might hear her a couple of times when Winston's going to Charrington's shop, she's in that area of town. And I hadn't written her any script, because I just wanted her to come in and literally say, "Fish for sale," but she made me do 10 minutes of improv in a little side office to pretend I was buying some salmon off her and stuff [laughs].
RMB: Honestly, this woman is just an inspiration.
JW: And there's lots of Easter eggs for Muse fans apparently. I know Muse's music to a degree but not to some of the level of those superfans on the internet who have picked up a lot of things, like Matthew [Bellamy] wrote the violin in the prole quarter, a song from one of their albums, replaced as a viola sort of number.
RMB: Played by Ilan [Eshkeri], the co-composer, he plays the violin.
JW: Ah, Ilan plays that? Ah, right. See, there you go, another Easter egg. “The Uprising,” is that what it's called?
RMB: Yeah, “Uprising.”
JW: Yeah, and actually there's plenty of musical sort of little cues and stories for people who want to delve into it and listen.
RMB: Before we hit record, me and Joe were chatting about other plans, other projects that are to come, and so really excited to see what we do next together. I'm just really happy that it worked out well and people seem to be enjoying it.
JW: It's a great thing. I was saying I've had friends who would never have listened to audiobooks, let alone audio drama, message me out of the blue just saying how exciting it is and they've never heard anything like it. As well as seasoned audio drama listeners and audiobook listeners who've responded to it saying, "This is unlike anything else." And it's just so exciting to be a part of, and I'm so glad I said yes. Thank you for asking.
RMB: Of course. Joe, lovely to talk to you as always.
JW: A pleasure.
This interview was initially published in the US.