Laverne Cox arrived at the New York City premiere of Animal Farm on April 21 with a clear sense of why this particular story matters right now. The actress and activist, 53, spoke with PEOPLE on the red carpet about the animated film, which is based on George Orwell’s landmark 1945 novel of the same name, and the reasons she believes its message has never been more necessary.
Cox voices Snowball, a sow who emerges as one of the central figures in the farm animals uprising against their mistreating farmer. The novel, which Orwell wrote as a direct response to the dangers of totalitarian rule drawing specifically from the Russian Revolution of 1917 has spent decades as required reading in classrooms around the world. Cox made clear she sees it as something far beyond an assignment.
Why the story feels so personal
For Cox, stepping into this project was not simply about lending her voice to an animated character. It was about using one of literature’s most recognized allegories to speak to a set of issues she has spent years advocating against.
She spoke about the rollback of gender affirming care for both children and adults, the loss of jobs and healthcare access, and what she described as a sustained effort to marginalize and dehumanize transgender people. Cox framed these developments not as isolated policy debates but as part of a broader pattern that Orwell’s work was explicitly written to warn against.
She also used the premiere as an opportunity to point audiences toward further education, recommending the book How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley as companion reading for anyone moved by the film. Her concern, she expressed, is that history is being actively rewritten and that understanding the full, accurate record of the past is the only real defense against repeating it.
A cast drawn together by belief in the material
The film was directed by Andy Serkis, who spoke during a Q&A session moderated by Angel Studios co-founder Jordan Harmon about how the project assembled its remarkable ensemble. The cast includes Seth Rogen, Glenn Close, Kieran Culkin, Steve Buscemi and Kathleen Turner, among others.
Serkis made clear during the panel that financial incentives were not what drew this particular group of performers to the table. Each of them, he said, came with a genuine and deeply felt connection to Orwell’s source material, a passion for what the novel represents and what a new adaptation could accomplish for modern audiences. He described the resulting cast as something the production felt enormously fortunate to have brought together.
What the story is really about
Turner, who voices the weary donkey Benjamin, spoke during the panel about the film’s core emotional argument that a more equitable and compassionate world is not just desirable but necessary. Her character is one of the novel’s most quietly devastating figures, a skeptic who sees the revolution’s corruption coming and cannot stop it. Turner connected that thread directly to what she described as enraging levels of wealth inequality in the world today.
The film’s arrival feels calibrated to the moment. Animal Farm has been adapted before most notably in 1954 and again in 1999 but this version, arriving in May 2026, enters a cultural conversation that many of its cast members clearly feel it was always meant to be part of.
What Cox hopes audiences leave with
At its heart, Cox’s message at the premiere was about awareness. She wants viewers, particularly younger ones who may be encountering the story for the first time, to recognize what is being normalized and to resist the instinct to accept it as ordinary.
The goal, as she framed it, is not despair but education learning the history, understanding the mechanisms of how rights get stripped away, and refusing to allow those mechanisms to operate without scrutiny. For Cox, Animal Farm is not a relic of the past. It is a mirror held up to the present.
Animal Farm opens in theaters on May 1.
EXCLUSIVE : PEOPLE