The Life of Chuck: Mark Hamill and Karen Gillan Remember Gateway Stephen King Stories

Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, is a genre-bending existential exploration of the nature of being human. It’s based on one of Stephen King‘s more recent novellas featured in If It Bleeds. The sentimental nature of the film may surprise those who think that Flanagan and King are only versed in the world of horror, but their fans will know that this is a match made in darkly optimistic heaven. When we spoke to the cast about making the movie—which is in wide release right now—they were eager to share the King stories that made them fall in love with the author and his vibrantly emotional and often terrifying vision of the world. 

Star Wars icon Mark Hamill, who brings to life Chuck’s grandfather Albie Krantz in the film, still remembers his first interaction with the bestselling author.

“One of the first ones I read was Pet Sematary, which is absolutely, unbearably terrifying,” Hamill tells us. From there he moved on to “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” “The Body” (which Stand By Me is based on), and The Green Mile. “It’s amazing how versatile he is,” Hamill continues. “It’s almost a shame that he’s typed as a horror writer when there’s so many other emotions that he elicits, not only in his non-genre work, but in something like The Shining. There are such human, relatable moments. I think that’s part of his gift, making you relate and believe in the people and the circumstances, so that when things go sideways, you’re unprepared.”

Like many of us, Hamill would often watch a King film and immediately feel the need to read the book, recalling just how much of an impact The Shining made on him in both mediums.

“A lot is left to the audience in terms of interpretation because that’s just the kind of director Kubrick is,” says Hamill. “He’s much more interested in the atmosphere and the composition. He’s a fabulous filmmaker, but when you read the book, you hear the character’s thoughts, you find out who the ghosts are, what incident occurred there that made it become haunted, all these things that you have to lose to make a movie two and a half hours long. So I walked straight from seeing The Shining to a bookstore to buy the book to figure out what the hell I just watched.” 

By seeing Chuck experience multiple moments throughout his life, the film features four different actors bringing the character to life, including Broadway’s Benjamin Pajak who plays Chuck as a teenager. And the young actor’s life was set on a completely different trajectory due to his watching Stand By Me.

“That changed my whole thing about acting,” Pajak remembers. “I’ll never forget that moment when I saw it for the first time. My mom told me that I had to watch it. That was the first kind of moment that I ever really interacted with Stephen’s work. I felt connected to it. I felt that the actors really knew what they were doing and knew their characters. And after seeing that film, it kind of changed the whole meaning of acting for me.” 

The Life of Chuck is very much an ensemble film and to fill its many roles, Mike Flanagan looked to his friends like Matthew Lillard. Best known for iconic ‘90s movies in Hackers and SLC Punk, as well as playing legendary horror villain Stu Macher in Scream, Lillard brings an unexpectedly life-affirming, if brief, warmth to Flanagan’s newest project.

Lillard’s route into King had a shared component with Pajak’s: his mother. “The reality is that my mom was and is to this day, a voracious reader,” the actor tells us. “She passed that down to myself and to my oldest daughter. My mom had a standing order that any bookstore we ever went to as a family, I was always allowed to buy a book. And at some point on this journey, she’s like, ‘You should buy this book.’ And she handed me Christine, And I remember being on the way to a family vacation in the back of the car—back before phones and that sort of way to distract yourself—and I was sitting there reading Christine. I’ll never forget it. It was a monumental experience for me, and one of the reasons I became such an avid reader.” 

Another cast member who was introduced to King’s work by a parent is Flanagan’s wife and frequent collaborator, Kate Siegel. From her starring role in the underrated home invasion flick Hush to her emotionally powerful performance in Flanagan’s breakout The Haunting of Hill House and beyond, Siegel is a powerhouse and she brings the theme and thesis of The Life of Chuck home as the teacher he’ll never, ever forget.

“My father was a huge Stephen King fan and had every single book,” Siegel explains. “But because my sister and I were young, those books weren’t upstairs where we kept all the family books. And this is way before people had the internet.” 

Instead the books were kept in a towering floor to ceiling bookshelf in the basement of her home, making them an irresistible temptation to a young Siegel. 

“I knew that those books were off limits, those were naughty dark books,” she continues. “So I would sneak downstairs at like nine or 10 at night and read a Stephen King book until I was so scared I had to run back to my room.” At the time, it felt like an intellectual rollercoaster. “I didn’t know books could do that. That they could transport you like that. It taught me everything I knew about storytelling; it taught me everything I knew about bravery and how to withstand impossible circumstances, because Stephen King is never writing about the clown in It. He’s writing about the kids. He’s never writing about all of the terrible gods of the lost in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. He’s talking about survival. It taught me the type of person I want to be.”

Familial ties were a theme throughout our chats, just like they are in King’s work. And Doctor Who’s Amelia Pond herself, Karen Gillan, had long been warned by her father about the ominous horror of one of King’s films that would end up landing itself as one of the most important films in her cinematic life.

“For me, it’s seeing The Shining or not seeing The Shining,” Gillan explains, “because my dad really built it up in my head. I don’t know if I wasn’t allowed to watch it or I was just too scared to watch it, but I was watching all the other ones like The Exorcist and everything. And then it just built up and up and up in my mind. Then I finally saw it, and I was like that is really scary but it’s also like one of the coolest, most well crafted films I’ve ever seen. It’s my favorite film of all time.”

King can have that effect.  The Life of Chuck is in theaters everywhere now. 

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