// SPACE.COM — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Anthony Mackie, Ariana DeBose, and John Leguizamo reveal why they joined Andy Weir's sci-fi audio drama 'Exoplanet' (interview)
'It's coming from brilliant minds who build worlds so impeccably. And it's about real stuff we’re dealing with today.'
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In any respectable audiobook project, finding the names of Andy Weir ("The Martian," "Project Hail Mary") and Benjamin Percy ("The Ninth Metal," "Wolverine") attached would elicit intense fan interest, but add the superstar vocal talents of Anthony Mackie ("Avengers: Infinity War," "Avengers: Doomsday"), Ariana DeBose ("West Side Story"), and John Leguizamo ("Ice Age"), and it catapults this sonic odyssey into the stratosphere.
Such is the case with "Exoplanet," Audible Original’s new 7-episode science fiction audio drama executive produced by Weir and penned by Percy. Its planet-hopping space disaster narrative sees the crew of the starship Wild Blue Yonder hit a quantum anomaly, forcing their ship to crash-land onto a deadly exoplanet. All is not as it seems, though, as each crew member arrives in a different era on the same world.
We hooked up with Mackie, DeBose, and Lequizamo to learn more about this renaissance of audio dramas and what attracted them to board Weir's sci-fi thriller.
One crew. One planet. Three timelines. No one survives alone. A sci-fi thriller executive produced by Andy Weir (#1 bestselling author of Project Hail Mary, The Martian), with an all-star cast led by Anthony Mackie, Ariana DeBose and John Leguizamo.
Exoplanet is free for Audible members, but also available for purchase separately.
Mackie voices Chief Engineer Jeff Shaw. His attraction to the imaginative genre began at an early age thanks to some cool family friends while growing up in the Big Easy.
"My brother went to college at Morehouse," he tells SPACE. "I was like 8, and he was 18. He’d always bring friends home, because New Orleans is a party city, so they'd come over and get drunk. But one of his friends gave me a book by Walter Mosley and one by Octavia Butler, and I got hooked into sci-fi and the future."
"From 'Back to the Future' to 'Aliens,' the future was such an idea of what was going to be out there. Now we’re living it," reveals Mackie. "It’s very important to me as a human being to have that construct as a part of my career. The only thing more arrogant than wanting to be president is standing up and saying, 'Yeah, I can go to space.' That sounds crazy to me."