*Ariana DeBose lends her voice to “Exoplanet,” a new Audible Original sci-fi thriller premiering today, Nov. 5. The Academy Award winner stars alongside Anthony Mackie and John Leguizamo as a first officer stranded centuries away from her crew.
Andy Weir, the bestselling author behind “The Martian” and “Project Hail Mary,” serves as executive producer. Benjamin Percy, whose credits include “Wolverine” and “The Ninth Metal,” wrote the series. It is an original story, not an adaptation or a franchise spinoff. Skywalker Sound crafted the immersive Dolby Atmos sound design, its first audio-first project.
The story kicks off when a quantum anomaly tears apart the starship Wild Blue Yonder. Each surviving crew member crash-lands on the same deadly exoplanet, but in a different era. Mackie plays Chief Engineer Jeff Shaw, who battles a brutal present to get home to his daughter. Leguizamo’s Science Officer Logan Bowers wakes in a machine-ruled future. DeBose’s First Officer Becca Bang lands in a hostile alien past.
The crash was no accident. An alien intelligence that feeds on human technology has been waiting for the crew in every timeline. To survive, they must find a way to reach each other across the centuries.
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DeBose spoke with EURweb about voicing Becca, recording alone in a booth, her character’s AI sidekick and why fans should tune in.
“Well, I play Becca Bang, and it’s kind of nutty. She’s a fabulous, fabulous character, and she’s basically in charge of driving what is essentially a kind of bus across the galaxy to this exoplanet. Along the way, something happens and they crash. And they land on this exoplanet, a hostile exoplanet, 500 years apart.”
That gap creates Becca’s biggest obstacle. “Ultimately, the great challenge for Becca is that she lands 500 years in the past and has to figure out how does she communicate with anyone that survived said crash across time,” DeBose explained. “It’s not just trying to find her friends. It’s not possible to find her friends.”
Because the crash throws Becca back before her own birth, she has to reach her crew from a time when she doesn’t exist yet. “The reality that she doesn’t even exist is always with her,” DeBose said. “But her goal becomes, how do I make a way for my friends to survive? What seeds can I leave them? And I thought that was just a very fascinating prompt. Like what a challenge, what a task for anyone, right?”
Becca faces that mission alone, and DeBose had to convey her loneliness through her voice. “Luckily, when I recorded my parts of our story, I was alone in a booth,” she said. “So I put myself in a state of imagination. And thankfully, my surroundings were very, very helpful in that regard. But ultimately, you use everything within you. Anytime you felt lonely, any thought, anything you can create in your mind that can help you create a sound, which was a great challenge.”
The audio format came with its own learning curve. “When I said yes to this project and this medium, to be honest, I don’t know that I fully understood what I was getting into, but I loved doing it,” DeBose admitted. “It’s a lot of voice work, which is very similar to some of the work I’ve done in theater.”
Her biggest adjustment came from working without her co-stars in the room. “The thing that I really had to adjust to was not having people to necessarily act off of, because Anthony and John and I all recorded our work separately,” she said. “So that took some getting used to. But also, once you get into listening to our story, you’ll understand why we did it that way. It was actually very helpful.”
She added, “I had to really adapt to just owning this journey that Becca is on and that she is doing it alone. Granted, she’s got a little help from her Puter. Puter is like our AI companion that keeps her on track and helps her with different challenges along the way. But it’s the same approach to acting I’ve always taken to any job, just highly isolated.”
Each astronaut in the series travels with a Puter. For Becca, that companion feels more like family. “I love Puter in the world, or at least Becca’s Puter. She sort of sounds like her sister,” DeBose said. “So it’s the companion. It’s the sisterly relationship that helps her find her way through.”
DeBose also wrestled with the idea of trusting a machine. “When you are in extreme moments, being able to have something to rely on, even though in my Ariana brain, I’m like, relying on an AI companion feels insane. But in the context of this world, it’s everything,” she said. “Because when you are stranded 500 years in the past, trying to figure out literally anything on your own can be very, very challenging. So why wouldn’t you use every tool at your disposal?”
That role pushed her past her own views. “I found compassion for that in my own being. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of AI,” she shared. “It’s a fun thing to get to be an artist, because you find compassion for things that you may not always understand in your own being.”
The Dolby Atmos sound design helps listeners step into Becca’s world. “It just enhances absolutely everything,” DeBose said. “It’s like, while you’re listening to our story, you close your eyes, you get every tiny detail. And the way this technology has allowed the sound production to come alive, you can close your eyes and feel like you’re in our story with us. And that to me is always very exciting. I love that. Like, create a sound haven for me so that I can be there with you.”
The sci-fi thriller genre sparked something in her as a performer. “What I love about this genre is that it’s so mind-bending,” she said. “Especially as an actor, it required me to open my own wells of creativity because anything’s kind of possible in the sci-fi genre. I really believe in possibility, put it that way.”
Beyond the spectacle, DeBose believes the story’s themes hit close to home. “I think that’s part of the beauty of sci-fi, right? There’s these larger notions,” she said. “Sometimes I can more easily process something that feels a bit far away.”
“I think these ideas of working together, of sacrifice, of survival are kind of what we’re living through now,” she continued. “This is just modeled in extreme situations in the future, right? So I think there’s plenty for audiences to connect with and be excited about, but more importantly, find themselves in. I think each one of these characters, there’s a little bit of everyone in all of them.”
DeBose also promised her fans something unexpected. “I want you to know it’s high stakes. It’s very different, or at least for me. So if you know my work, you’re probably expecting me to do a movie or a musical,” she said. “But this was a different challenge for me. My stakes are higher. But the love for my craft is very present.”
She added, “This story is exceptional. Ben Percy wrote an incredible script. You will not be disappointed. It couldn’t be more exciting,” she said. “The performances from Anthony Mackie and John Leguizamo are just supreme. So I think this will both open your imagination and also give you something to root for.”
“Exoplanet” is available now on Audible. Listen to EURweb’s exclusive clip from Episode 2 below.
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