THE DARK TOWER

THE DARK TOWER | Matthew McConaughey casts a spell in the Stephen King adap…

Elba and McConaughey in a race to the top.

Iloved it!” Stephen King told director Nikolaj Arcel after watching a cut of The Dark Tower – cue a sigh of relief from the Danish filmmaker, who’d never made a movie outside of Scandinavia, let alone mounted a dark fantasy on the scale of King’s eight-book series. “It would have been horrible if he had emailed me and said, ‘Yeah, not so much,’” Arcel laughs.

It helped that he was a fan. Having devoured The Gunslinger, the first in King’s Dark Tower series, as a teenager (“I basically learned to write and read English by reading Stephen King books”), Arcel was “hooked for life” and actively pursued the movie adap after releasing his 2012 Danish drama A Royal Affair to Oscar-nommed acclaim.

Five years on, he’s finally rescued The Dark Tower from development hell (something both J.J. Abrams and Ron Howard failed to do), and his film is set to launch both a follow-up TV series (which he’s also penning) and a series of sequels. “It’s the beginning of the saga in a very smart way,” he says. It certainly has a big enough world to warrant that expanded universe. Set in an alternate dimension, Arcel’s film sees 11-year-old Jake (newcomer Tom Taylor) finding a way into the alt-reality of Mid-World and meeting gunslinger Roland Deschain (Idris Elba), who’s on a mission to find the titular edifice – but he’ll have to get there before evil sorcerer Walter Padick, aka the Man In Black (Matthew McConaughey), if he wants to save Mid-World from destruction.

While Arcel says Elba’s “deep, emotional core” made him perfect for Roland, he was determined to enlist McConaughey as the Man in Black. Luckily, McConaughey was just as keen. “He was like, ‘He’s the coolest guy,’” Arcel says. And, according to the director, McConaughey didn’t shy away from Padick’s darkness. “He didn’t come in and say, ‘Maybe we should try to defend some of his actions?’ No. It’s: ‘Who can I kill today in a really horrible way?’” he laughs. “So he had tonnes of fun with the character and so did I.”

ETA | 26 JULY / The Dark Tower opens in cinemas next month.