Neuromancer arrives on Apple TV on January 22 after a 42-year wait since William Gibson published the foundational cyberpunk novel in 1984.
Briana Middleton holds up a vintage issue of WIRED featuring Keanu Reeves on the cover during a Zoom call.
Middleton plays the razorgirl Molly in the forthcoming series. Her character first appeared in Gibson’s 1995 short story Johnny Mnemonic, which was adapted into a film starring Reeves.
The relationship between Molly and the protagonist Case mirrors the dynamic between Neo and Trinity in The Matrix. Callum Turner stars as Case in the new Apple TV adaptation.
Gibson’s original novel focused on Case, a young computer jockey who connects to cyberspace through a neural jack. Case teams up with Molly and a former military man named Armitage to infiltrate the offworld home of the Tessier-Ashpool family.
The family built an immense fortune around the technology company they founded. When the book debuted, concepts like cyberspace, brain-computer interfaces, and autonomous artificial intelligence existed far outside mainstream technology.
Hollywood spent decades attempting to bring the material to film or television without success. Showrunners Graham Roland and JD Dillard finally cracked the adaptation challenge for the streaming platform.
“When I found out we were going to be doing this,” Middleton told WIRED, describing her thrift store discovery, “I was at the thrift shop in my neighborhood and I found this.”
“Dude, it was eight bucks,” Middleton told WIRED.
“I was like, ‘This is crazy,’” Middleton told WIRED.
