Briana Middleton has something to show me. “Wait!” she says just as we’re about to end our Zoom call, reaching for something just beyond her screen.
“When I found out we were going to be doing this,” she says, “I was at the thrift shop in my neighborhood and I found this.” Then she points it at the camera: an issue of WIRED from 1995 featuring Keanu Reeves on the cover alongside the line “William Gibson on the making of Johnny Mnemonic.”
Very apropos. The 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story by Gibson, who also wrote the screenplay. Molly, the “razorgirl” Middleton plays in Apple TV’s forthcoming Neuromancer adaptation, made her first appearance in that short story. Her relationship with the protagonist Case, played in the series by Callum Turner, mirrors the one Reeves’ Neo had with Trinity in The Matrix, which is steeped in Gibsoneque lore.
