The Stand Cast on Using Stephen Kings Novel as Character Layers for CBS All Acc

Stephen King’s 1978 novel “The Stand” is a 1300-page epic that starts with the outbreak of a fatal virus monikered Captain Trips that manages to take out 99.4% of the population — and not just humans, either; it also ravages certain animal species, including dogs.

The heart of the novel is in the journey of the survivors — those rare individuals who are immune for some special reason — as they journey across the country to find each other and build two distinct and seemingly polar opposite communities: Those who follow their dreams of Mother Abagail and Hemingford Home eventually end up in Boulder, Colo., while those who give into the temptations of the Dark Man aka Randall Flagg end up in Vegas. But simply settling there is only the middle of this story, which then requires another physical journey as select members of the Boulder community road trip to Vegas to try to put an end to the Dark Man’s evil ways.

“‘The Stand’ isn’t about the pandemic, it’s about what happens when you hit that reset button, what’s left over and you have all this handful of people in Boulder and a handful of people in Vegas, and it’s about the choices that you make — what do you decide to do, how do you move on from here?” says actor James Marsden.

CBS All Access’ adaptation of “The Stand” is a nine-part limited series, with that final episode featuring new material from King. Therefore, a significant amount of these beloved characters’ backstories and journeys had to be condensed or left out of the scripts entirely.

Here, the cast of “The Stand” previews what to expect from their characters.

• Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg)

  

  There is some “God dust” on this 108-year-old woman, Goldberg says. She was one of the oldest living people before Captain Trips ravaged the world and is the oldest one now. And with that age comes wisdom, experience and a lot of faith.

  Mother Abagail reaches out to the survivors of Captain Trips through their dreams, telling them to come find her. But where they will find her is not her family’s land, on which she lives alone, killing chickens in order to prepare a fresh meal for those who make the journey, as in the book.

  “She doesn’t have family and she probably put herself in [Hemingford] Home to hang out with some folks,” Goldberg says.

  Although Mother Abagail knows what is coming because “occasionally God talks to me and I got stuff I need to go do,” she has to sit and wait for the others to find her first.

  “There’s lots of backstory for Mother Abagail [in the book and] I said that that was all fine but she’s not that person. Who she becomes at the moment when we see her is not really touched by what she came through,” Goldberg says, noting that “whatever else happened in her life before that doesn’t negate the fact that when God says, ‘Hey, I need to get these people,’ that’s what she’s got to do. And she’s not always great at it because it’s tiring, it’s exhausting, but she knows that that’s really why she’s here.”

  Goldberg had the most extensive transformation into her character, due to her character’s advanced age. “Whenever we see old people, we see them with wrinkles and stuff, but that’s not how people actually — or particularly women of color, that’s not how women of color age. We become structural, we’ll spread, but our faces become more detailed,” she says. But, “what we discovered was we had to put wrinkles on me because if I live to 108, I’m probably going to look just like this. But, I said, ‘you need to give me some structure [on my neck] so that you see that it’s that strain that you get when you get older.'”

• Stu Redman (James Marsden)

  

  Marsden describes Stu as “small-town East Texas guy” who couldn’t afford “the big dreams that he might have wanted” due to his lifestyle, but says he “just got used to living in this little Midwest bubble.”

  After the military security guard who fled the facility where there was a breach with Captain Trips crashes into a gas station where Stu happens to be, Stu and the other men he is with are taken to a locked-down facility of their own for observation and quarantine. Although one of the people who is immune to Captain Trips, Marsden calls Stu an otherwise “ordinary guy.”

  “I think he lacked a little purpose in the beginning and he’s one of my favorite types of heroes, which is a reluctant hero, who’s not trying to be necessarily heroic but he’s just someone with a very rigid sense of morals and values that I think he got from living in that small town,” he says.

  Stu also “craves order and structure,” Marsden says. “At the end of the day he’s a man who looks himself in the mirror and when no one’s looking he still chooses to do the right thing. And I think he provides a nice contrast to everything that Flagg represents.”

• Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young)

  

  Frannie is first introduced in CBS All Access’ version of “The Stand” through Harold Lauder’s (Owen Teague) point of view. “You have to have an understanding of her that only Harold has, in order to break out of that eventually, in order to be shocked by her, in order to actually understand what’s going on,” Young explains. “Harold has created a version of Frannie that exists on a pedestal, and it’s his mission and her mission as well throughout the rest of the series to contend with that.”

  The core relationship Frannie has in the “before” is with her father, and once he is gone, she hits a low point. It is Harold who gives her hope at that moment, Goldsmith previews, which is why Frannie is willing to go on the road with him, “even though he’s the annoying kid from down the block who always has made her feel a little uncomfortable by his gaze on her.”

  She explains: “She sacrifices that kind of comfort just to prevail, to go to Boulder, to start this new world. At the end of the day, they are still the only people with a shared history, and that means something. And that’s a really interesting thing that we go into in the story: what does that mean — what does shared history mean? And can you ignore it, can you pretend it’s not there, does it matter in the end? We had a lot of fun exploring what it means to know someone — not just be acquainted with someone, but to really know someone.”

  In the novel, Frannie ended up in Boulder but didn’t trek to Vegas to take down Randall Flagg, but in the new coda that King has written for this series, she says, Frannie does get more of a chance to take her stand, too.

  “I feel great amount of pride and being able to be involved with this last episode, to be able to bring to life words that people have never heard before from Stephen King,” she says.

• Harold Lauder (Owen Teague)

  

  No longer an overweight teenager as he is in the novel, Teague’s version of Lauder is still a bullied kid who spends a lot of time in his own head and pines, to a degree, for his sister’s friend Frannie. But he’s also a bit more sociopathic, which makes him ripe for Flagg’s influence.

  After Harold convinces Frannie to leave their hometown of Ogunquit, Maine because “no one’s coming” to save them, he gets a chance to play hero to her as the leader of their two-person traveling team. But he may rarely succeed at being a hero, as he has more fears than he is often willing to admit.

  He will settle into Boulder and seem to put aside his dislike of Stu, all while still being tempted by Randall Flagg. But one major change for Harold’s motivations will be the way he is rejected by Frannie, as Young shares that Frannie’s journal entries, in which Harold learned how she really felt him and Stu in the book, are not going to be heard in the show.

  “The energy in those journal entries is a Frannie that we needed to show in small doses but then also show her growth from,” she explains. When she’s on the road with Harold in the show instead, “they have this brother-sister type thing where they can just kind of get in each other’s guts a little bit.”

• Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård)

  

  The Dark Man went by many names in the novel, but in the show he is known as Randall Flagg, appearing to certain characters in their nightmares. This includes Lloyd Henreid (Nat Wolff), who has been arrested and is in jail, in danger of dying of thirst and starvation.

  “The scene in the jail kind of functions as a dream and also the fact that everyone in the entire jail gets Captain Trips except for him makes you think that in a sort of magical way Flagg is controlling him and making it so because he knows, ‘Oh, I can use him and he’s weak and so I’m going to prey upon that,'” says Wolff.

  Although the book was never explicit about the source of Randall’s powers, Goldberg half-jokes that he has “devil dust” on him. Executive producer Benjamin Cavell previously told Variety that his power will rise and fall “based on the strength of his acolytes’ faith in him.”

• Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo)

  

  In the novel, Larry was written specifically as a white character, and it was often made reference to the fact that his music sounded “like [Black] music.” Casting Adepo didn’t change the type of musician Larry was in the “before” times, but it did give Adepo the freedom to play with the character’s style, even “down to me being able to pick the guitar that I wanted or the lighter that I wanted because Larry was a smoker,” he says.

  Just as in the novel, Larry will meet up with Rita Blakemoor (Heather Graham) in New York and realize they have to leave the city. Eventually he will also end up on the road with Nadine Cross (Amber Heard) and a young boy named Joe (Gordon Cormier), and just as in the novel, Larry has a self-deprecating demeanor at times that makes him think he’s not good for those around him.

  “Perhaps if he was able to step out of himself once in awhile there are a lot of things that could have went differently: his music career, maybe he would have been a famous singer if he wasn’t so singer, or maybe he would have had lasting relationships with women if he was more willing to be open and sincere and vulnerable,” Adepo says. “At his core I think he’s a sweet person, I just don’t think he knows that.”

• Nadine Cross (Amber Heard)

  

  Nadine is a rare character harboring a dark secret in “The Stand.” Unlike the others, who have only recently begun having nightmares about Randall Flagg, Nadine has had a relationship with him since she was a child.

  “Having that be represented as backstory in some way was the thing I cared most about because in my mind having her exist in this world could only be justified when taken into context that she has been groomed, in a way, from the time she was young,” Heard says.

  In the beginning, he was keeping an eye on her “almost as a guardian figure in her youth,” she continues, but as she got older, it became “much more predatory [and] possessive. I can understand as a human being how moving from seeming to be a protection or almost a paternal figure, how enticing that would be if you were an orphan or otherwise vulnerable. It makes a lot of sense to me how that could confuse loyalty and ties, to your own detriment later in life.”

• Nick Andros (Henry Zaga)

  

  Nick is a Deaf man who doesn’t speak in the novel, but Zaga is a hearing actor. In order to prepare to play someone who is differently-abled than himself, Zaga worked with an ASL (American Sign Language) coach, attended a Deaf convention and met with many Deaf individuals, as well as those involved with CODA (Children of Deaf Adults).

  “There was a lot to learn, a lot to get right. As actors we have to be as respectful and honorable as possible with these roles,” he admits.

  Deep in Nick’s backstory in the novel is that after he was orphaned, a man named Rudy helped him learn ASL. This was a piece of the character’s history that “really touched” Zaga, he shares. “I made a little notebook that was probably a gift he gave me so for people who don’t sign I could communicate with them.”

  The way Rudy treated Nick was what Zaga used as inspiration for how Nick would treat Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke), a man who is differently-abled mentally. “I see him as this person who was like me a few years ago back when I didn’t have anyone but I had so much potential,” Zaga says.

  Nick is also an essential part of Mother Abagail’s plans, and the show will explicitly showcase the goodness in Nick through a “merciful gesture” he makes to a man who attacks him, Zaga says, which proves Mother Abagail is right about who she is trusting.

  “The thing about Nick that drew me so much to this character was the infinite ability to do good — to forgive, to start over. I think that’s where Mother Abagail goes, ‘Oh I need that guy; I need that guy on my team to lead these people.’ That level of empathy is something we don’t see very often,” Zaga says.

• Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke)

  

  To get inside the mind of Tom Cullen, Henke watched a lot of YouTube videos of someone he knew who had sustained a head injury “and was just never quite the same,” he shares. The details about Tom in the book became important visual layers and references Henke added to the character, from pieces of his wardrobe to the “certain toys” Tom might have. But he also used Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” to find the right voice for the character.

  “I had learned that people with a head injury, a lot of times they learn to sing — that helps them learn to talk again. So when I was working on my voice, I would sing ‘Coat of Many Colors’ and then I would say, ‘Hi my name is Tom Cullen,” he says.

  Tom has a memorized speech he gives when he meets new people that starts with introducing himself and explaining his situation. He often doesn’t remember if he has already explained himself to someone, so he will repeat himself. Because of this, the character went through life without people asking much of him “because they didn’t think [he] was capable of much,” Henke says, but that changes when he meets Nick.

  Because Nick is Deaf and doesn’t speak and Tom can’t read, the two have to find a new way of communicating in order to find Mother Abagail and eventually get to Boulder. There, Tom becomes an integral part of the plan to understand what Randall Flagg is doing out in Vegas.

  To be entrusted with such a thing, Henke says, gives Tom confidence: “The fact that they thought I was capable and are putting their trust in me was the greatest victory of my life. It felt so good to have their support.”

• Lloyd Henreid (Nat Wolff)

  

  Lloyd Henreid has pretty much been a No. 2 his whole life: at first it is the No. 2 to Poke, a criminal with whom Lloyd robs people, and then takes on a similar partnership with Randall Flagg.

  “I pushed for getting the scene where Lloyd robs the convenience store in the second episode because there was a version that came back where you just heard about it and I said, ‘I think you need to see it’ because I think, to see Lloyd in his previous life, you see that he was always kind of pathetic and he was always a bit of a victim who then ended up victimizing other people,” Wolff says.

  As in the novel, Lloyd is caught for that robbery in the limited series and ends up in jail, which is where Randall Flagg comes to him and offers him a literal way out, if he will pledge his allegiance to him.

  “It’s like when you watch one of those cult documentaries and you see these charismatic cult leaders and then you watch this young actress from LA is somehow you know is keeping a slave or something awful and just how did this happen? People who have a weakness or a vulnerability are preyed upon by these charismatic leaders and I thought that was much more interesting than just playing an evil henchman,” says Wolff.

  Still, Wolff admits that after doing “months” of extensive character work, the night before shooting he fell into a “depressed mood” panicking that he was going to take it too far. While in a Subway sandwich shop, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” came on the radio and “it just sort of possessed me and I started dancing around the Subway and everyone was looking at me and I thought, ‘OK I think I got it.’ And then for the rest of the shoot that became the Lloyd anthem,” he shares.

• Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear)

  

  Bringing to life the “dime story philosopher” that is former professor Glen Bateman is no easy feat. For one thing, “Stephen King has said that, in a way, Glen is kind of his voice,” Kinnear points out. For another, because he is so esoteric, there were moments when Kinnear would pore over his dialogue and not understand about what Glen was talking.

  Glen is a character who had “already checked out of society” before the pandemic swept the globe, living alone with his dog. In many ways, Kinnear says, “he’s already many, many moves on the chessboard further along than most of society,” but he decides to team up with Stu and follow what Mother Abagail is saying in his dreams because “it’s like a thesis paper for him to see which way humanity’s intrinsically good and evil qualities are going to wrap up for these people. I think he’s enjoying the ride.”

  Glen’s dreams are not just of Mother Abagail, though. He also sees some of the other people with whom he is supposed to come together, including Frannie. When he meets Stu and learns that not only is Stu having the same dreams but that Stu actually met Frannie, his agnostic ways are challenged. Suddenly what seemed other-worldly is very real and “he’s kind of forced to re-evaluate his own constitution about what he’s believed his whole life,” Kinnear says. “Through the experience of Mother Abagail he has a sort-of awakening.”

Read More About:

• Amber Heard,
• James Marsden,
• The Stand,
• Whoopi Goldberg

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