The Stand Tells a Timely Tale

A Stephen King classic makes its debut on Amazon Prime, with eery timing

In bringing Stephen King’s The Stand to screen, showrunner Benjamin Cavell could not help but feel intense pressure. “I know we all felt the weight of responsibility to do right by our iconic source material. We know what this book means to people,” says Cavell. “We were determined at all costs to maintain the soul of Stephen King’s masterpiece and of these iconic characters.”

What Cavell had no way of knowing, when he embarked on the project three years ago, was how relevant a story about a virus that ravages the world would end up becoming. “We were developing it having no idea that it would have this resonance,” says Cavell. “I won’t say it wasn’t surreal for all of us when we were in Vancouver in the early part of [2020] and realized what was happening. If it makes the show more resonant, that’s great, but our task has always been to adapt the book.”

Cavell has never regarded The Stand as a book about a pandemic; rather, the disease is a mechanism to empty out the world so that there can be an elemental struggle between good and evil. King himself has spoken about the post-apocalyptic novel being his version of Lord of the Rings, an epic journey that requires a catalyst to be set in motion. In The Stand, the spark is a virus named “Captain Trips,” developed as a biological weapon at a military research station.

In this battle for the soul of our species, the fate of mankind appears to rest on the frail shoulders of 108-year-old Mother Abagail Freemantle (Whoopi Goldberg), leader of the “good” survivors, whose psychic visions forecast a confrontation with “The Dark Man” Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), an otherworldly demon who’s set up his base of followers in Las Vegas. “She’s trying to get a whole bunch of people to do some things that maybe they don’t believe in. You know, basically, I’m doing The View,” quips Goldberg. “Abagail is the representation of what is supposed to be the light. Of course, when you are human, you are flawed, so she is probably not as ‘Magic Negro’ as she was maybe 30-40 years ago. But because she’s flawed, that makes her more interesting to me.” What drew Goldberg to King’s storytelling is the ambiguity of which characters are the righteous ones. “Some of the things you read in Stephen’s books, I just think, ‘OK, what would I do?’ And that’s the greatest thing, because we don’t say, ‘These people are bad,’ it becomes, ‘What would you do if you had to make this choice?’ ”

Pandemic worries aside, the world has changed quite a bit since King published The Stand in 1978. Adapting it into this nine-part series required some updating of the source material, so to make the journey feel more contemporary, King collaborated with the writers. “We have some original new material by Stephen King. He wrote a coda,” says Cavell. Part of that coda involves giving one of the female protagonists, who in the book is too far along in her pregnancy to make the long journey by foot, her own hero’s journey. “He had been thinking about it for 30 years, so what I will say about the coda is that it is his planned attempt to give Frannie [Odessa Young] her stand,” says Cavell.

In this frightening new world where only a few people appear immune to the virus, one of them is schoolteacher Nadine Cross, played by Amber Heard. Although her character is destined to side with Flagg, Heard says everything she needed to really understand about Nadine’s motivation for choosing the darkness was right there in the book. “I think, for me, King is the easiest author from which you can pull any sort of inspiration or guidance as a character,” says Heard. “He offers such a rich depth of material that the job is basically done for you. He fleshes out his characters and creates real humans, and I feel like no author gives you more to work with.”

Why we are so attracted to terror that hits a little too close to home is something that the cast of this limited series has given a lot of thought to. “We have a fascination and a curiosity about fear because we want to ultimately protect ourselves from it,” says James Marsden, who plays square-jawed ex-soldier Stu Redman, a follower of Mother Abagail. “We like to explore these emotions and the feelings of fear and control through these fictional journeys and Stephen King is the master of it.” But what heightens the stakes is grounding the events in reality, like, say, a global crisis. “It’s important to feel like this is something that could potentially happen,” says Marsden. “What would happen if there was a full reset? Where do we go from there? I think it’s just part of the human condition. We’re genuinely fascinated with all of the things that terrify us.”

The Stand debuts Friday, March 19th on Amazon Prime