The actress narrates Andy Weir’s follow-up novel for Audible -- and ET has an exclusive first listen to her performance.
Following the success of The Martian, a story about an astronaut stranded on Mars which was adapted by Ridley Scott into a Golden Globe-winning film starring Matt Damon, Andy Weir is back with his second novel, Artemis. This time, the author takes readers to the moon in a caper following Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara as she strives for a better life on Artemis, the first and only city on Earth’s natural satellite.
Published by Crown, Artemis is a page-turner earning praise from critics, fans and Rosario Dawson, who lends her voice to the Audible audiobook.
“I loved the vision of the future and the richness and diversity of the characters,” she tells ET. “Andy is a phenomenal writer and mostly presents this world in layman terms. It’s very descriptive and really transports you to the moon and into this future world in a way that is easily visualized by his writing.”
Working with a dialect coach, Dawson took on the challenge of performing seven different accents as well as voicing Jazz’s character from youth to adulthood.
“It was such an intense and incredibly exciting experience to bring so many characters to life,” she says, adding that getting into Jazz’s head was an engaging experience. “She's brilliant, present, skilled, confident, stubborn and incredibly quick -- my kind of gal. Her audacity and ingenuity is riveting as she maneuvers the myriad circumstances and challenging situations she keeps finding herself in. I love how game she is for it all. She'd have to be to thrive and survive in such a hostile environment as the moon. It's remarkable how many intense, dangerous and scary situations she puts herself in and exploring her tenacity, gumption and fierce intelligence through her journey was exciting and inspiring. I wish I could be so thoughtfully calculating with split second life or death choices!”
In an exclusive excerpt from Dawson’s performance, we find Jazz in a very vulnerable and emotional state, in the chambers of her cold and lonely home, where she’s faced with a death threat:
Artemis (Crown) and Rosario Dawson’s Audible performance are out now.