Drawback to a vigorous and spirited Presidential primary, I suppose: you miss the important news. As I understand it, they wanted Matthew McConaughey to play Roland, only he wanted to play the Man in Black, because, let’s face it: that’s a pretty sweet villain role to have. Maybe not a Christopher Lee-level villain role, but it’s definitely an Alan Rickman-level one, and you could see how an actor might want a shot at it. So they ask Idris Elba, who of course took the role.
Now, all of this means that they’re gonna have to rewrite Susannah’s character a little, of course. But it’s probably not going to have to be too much, and besides: Idris Elba. I’d cast him that role myself.
This should be interesting. I like seeing McConaughey in non-hearthrob roles. He’s a good actor when he’s allowed to be, such as the gritty warlord in Reign of Fire*.
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As a non-fan-of-Stephen-King’s, I have to ask: why would they have to revise one roll due to casting a different actor in another?
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*Well, I liked it….
It’s not that big a deal; one of the book’s main characters reacts at first to Roland in a certain way at times because he’s white and she’s black. It can be easily finessed, though.
Susannah is black. I don’t know why that would be relevant, except that as I understood it from the book, Roland is a white dude. The Dark Tower is Steven King’s version of Lord of the Rings, starring the spaghetti western version of Clint Eastwood. He picks up three companions. A boy, Jake, a black woman in a wheelchair, Susannah, and a drug addict named Eddie Dean. Then they go looking for this very important Rose, and trying to keep the bad guys from knocking down the Dark Tower that serves as a kind of central support for the entire universe.
And I look forward to seeing it. 🙂
one of Susannah’s multiple personalities hates white people.
But Moe, how will Idris be able to play the next James Bond if he’s working on TDT?
True, dammit. Then again, he probably didn’t want to shave.
I’ll be interested to see how they handle the chronology. Do you do “Wizard and Glass” first, or do you handle it the way it was in the books, with Roland telling the tale to his companions?
Never underestimate the power of the “recurring flashback” trope.
I suppose they could intersperse the book throughout the others with recurring flashbacks. Seems like that might hurt the pacing, though. It’s a long story.
I listened to the Dark Tower on audiobook, and have never felt the need to go back and read the series in print. Audio is about the only way I can take King – to me he tends to write 700 page novellas and novelettes, and in the case of TDT he wrote a 5000 page novel.
Hopefully whoever does the adaptation will manage to pull the themes out, rather than trying to do things faithfully, otherwise this is probably more than ten seasons of material, maybe more than fifteen.
Look on the bright side. At least it had a fitting ending.
Also, Hollywood has a good track record of converting King to the screen, and improving the story in the process. (I’d cite “Apt Pupil” as the best example, but there’s a lot of room for debate.)
Shaw. Shank. Redemption.
You mean, ‘oh crap, I have no idea how to end this, so I’ll cheese out’? Yeah, pretty fitting. Although it would have been better if he’d just quoted the beginning of one of the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time books…
He does that a lot. But I’m pretty sure this ending was intentional. The motif was solidly established over several books. Also, it worked.
I guess the end of Wizard and Glass was a decent ending. The end of “The Dark Tower”? Not so much.
So out of popular culture. I thought Idris was a very pretty girl’s name.