“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.
