NOS4A2
Riders On The StormWWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
Zachary Quinto as the
vampiric Charlie Manx.| 039
we meet her she is kind of uncertain about
where she is in the world, she’s having
troubles with her home life, she has a kind
of internalised sense of class inferiority
and there’s a real vulnerability to her. So
capturing that vulnerability with seeds of
badassness was the task. Ashleigh kind of
blew us away in somehow being able to
encapsulate both those things at once.”
And speaking of Zachary Quinto, anyone
who saw the Star Trek actor show off his
murder basement in American Horror Story
knows just how menacing he’s capable of
being and he is on superb form here. But
Charlie Manx is a unique challenge for any
actor, not to mention a casting department.
“In the course of the show we see Charlie
Manx in his 30s and we see him over 100
years old, and our first question was: how old
of a gentleman do you cast?” O’Brien laughs.
“Initially we were talking about some kind
of elder statesman to play the role and once
we decided we were looking for somebody
in his 30s or early 40s, we found out that
Zach was available. I’m just such a huge fan
of his I just started praying every night thathe would consider it, and thank goodness
that he did because I can’t really imagine
anybody else in the role. He is so specific
and focused, he created a whole different
physicality and voice for every age of Charlie
Manx, he’s just great in the part. He is funny,
he is ferocious and just laser focused and
super, super fun to watch.”
When he’s freshly fed, Charlie Manx
appears as a handsome, dapper young man.
When he’s hungry, he ages rapidly into a
hunched, skeletal figure, all wispy hair,
sagging skin and yellowing teeth. Although
his approach is vampiric in a sense, O’Brien
tells us that she was determined to avoid
going the cape and fangs route. “What we
took away from the book was, again, heading
towards a real world place,” she explains.
“Charlie Manx is a man, he’s not a monster.
He is monstrous but he was an actual human
being who lived on earth, who was born, and
was born in the 19th century, so in the older
look he may look monstrous but that’s partly
because nobody is 100 years old. He may
have bad teeth but his bad teeth are because
they didn’t have good dentistry back in 1890!
So we tried to start with him as a human
being and then think about what the aging
process would look like on a real person. The
more extreme looks just come from: nobody’s
really that old!”
We’ve seen the first few episodes and
can definitely attest to just how creepy thecharacter is, and to the fact that O’Brien and
the team working on the show have not shied
away from the darker aspects of Hill’s novel.
The author isn’t exactly known for pulling
his punches and this novel in particular
features some truly shocking moments of
violent horror. We had to wonder if there
were any qualms about featuring them in the
series but O’Brien tells us that she had no
intention of watering anything down.
“There are some really disturbing scenes
in the show that are pulled from the book
and there were a lot of conversations that
we had with the network about them,” she
remembers. “About how to portray them,
whether or not we were being responsible,
because we never wanted to be salacious for
salaciousness’ sake, but I think that some
of the more disturbing scenes are actually
very important to character and I think that
they were in the book for a reason and so I
felt like we needed to have them. AMC, to its
credit, want to talk through stuff like that
to make sure that it’s being responsible but
after we talked it through it was on board
and supportive. I think that some of the more
disturbing elements of the book which we
have put on the show are some of the more
complicated, interesting moments of the
show so I’m glad that it was up for it!”NOS4A2 begins at 9pm on 13 August on
AMC Global.“THE MORE
DISTURBING
SCENES ARE
IMPORTANT”
JAMI O’BRIENMAP TO THE
SHARED UNIVERSE
PENNYWISE LIVES?
There’s a great moment in the novel NOS4A2
in which we get a glimpse at Charlie Manx’s
roadmap. Titled ‘Map To The United Instates Of
America’, it’s the infernal monster’s guide to the
hidden highways and shorter ways including,
of course, directions to Christmasland. What
makes it exciting is the fact that the map
contains directions to the Lovecraft Keyhole,
the location of Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s
glorious comic Locke And Key, the Treehouse
Of The Mind, from Hill’s novel Horns, and the
Pennywise Circus in Derry, Maine.
Hill and Stephen King have a history of
dropping Easter Eggs and references to each
other’s work and it’s delightful to see that
preserved in the show. And while we shouldn’t
expect to see IT’s dancing clown drop in to
menace Vic McQueen any time soon, it is a
reminder that we’re finally going to get to see
that Locke & Key TV series before too long.
And, perhaps the most important thing is that
it’s fun. When we talked to Hill about the book
when it was published in 2014, he rebuffed
our query about a shared universe with “Nah,
mostly I’m just goofin’. I try not to take my own
stuff too seriously. In a way it kind of all takes
place in the same universe. But in Horns there’s
a moment when there’s a party going on and
Duke Hammer is playing on the boombox, and
that’s the band from Heart Shaped Box. But it’s
kind of like, just me foolin’.”