Taylor and Elba take
direction from director
Nikolaj Arcel.
Top right: Walter in hot
pursuit of the fabled
Dark Tower.
Bottom right: Roland
finds himself in ruins.McConaughey says. “There are so many
delicious ways to be evil, you know?”
Although the star hadn’t “even really heard
of ” The Dark Tower, he was tempted enough to
email King, looking for a reason to commit to
a rare full-on wrong ’un (he’s only fully broken
bad in 1994’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The
Next Generation and 2011’s Killer Joe). “I said,
‘Give me a one-liner to give me a jumping-off
point with Walter,’” McConaughey recalls. “He
wrote back, ‘He’s got a smile on his face and the
world by a string.’ I was like, ‘Beautiful. I’m in.’”
King, who makes clear that he had casting
approval as part of his deal to produce the movie
(his first ever, incredibly), had no hesitation in
saying yes. “To me, he was always Walter, pretty
much the way I’d imagined him,” he says. “He’s
thin, he’s intense, he’s got that black hair, as
black as a crow’s wing, he’s got those burning
eyes. When people fall back from him in fear,
you understand why.”
And, in an era where most big-screen big
bads can be read in some way as a comment on
a certain someone in the White House, Walter is
his own madman. “It’s a relief to have a bad guy
who’s not Trumpian,” laughs King, who was
blocked on Twitter by the President of the
United States of America just days after our
chat. “You can’t imagine Walter tweeting
something at three o’clock in the morning.”HOLLYWOOD MAY have long been
in the Stephen King business, but that doesn’t
always mean the Stephen King business has been
booming. For every Shawshank Redemption or
The Shining, there are a dozen failed efforts such
as The Mangler and Cell. Constant Readers don’t
always become Constant Viewers, and Arcel’s
film is by no means a sure thing. “This is a risky
project,” admits King. “It’s not backed up by a
bunch of comic books. How does it feel? You
want to know the truth? Scary. But I’m happy
with what we’ve got.”
The ambition of the plans for The Dark
Tower means that Arcel is already at work on
the TV series that will mostly be based on the
(standalone) fourth book, Wizard And Glass,and which will tell the tale of young Roland
(with Elba also set to show up now and again).
But he admits he’s designed The Dark Tower to
function as a one-off just in case. “People will be
able to watch it and not necessarily feel that it
continues,” he says. “But there is a sense that at
the end of the movie the saga can continue.”
If there is more to come, then King and co
have such sights to show you. There’s the arrival
of the rest of Roland’s ka-tet — former drug
addict Eddie Dean (a role Aaron Paul has
publicly lobbied for), his future wife Susannah,
and a dog-like creature called Oy — as they
accompany him on his quest. There are
gloriously insane landscapes, killer lobster
creatures, leftfield references to Harry Potter, and
even the introduction of young Stephen King
himself. “It’s just a question of who would play
me, because I’m so goddamn good-looking,”
laughs King. “Tom Cruise is too old to play the
young Steve King.” It all depends on how fast
that darn wheel can keep on turning...THE DARK TOWER IS IN CINEMAS FROM 17 AUGUST