Castle Rock
home looking to reconnect with his mother (Sissy Spacek) and finds his legal know-how in demand when a mysterious young man, known as “The Kid” (Bill Skarsgard), is found in a cage in a dank, dark, long-unused section of Shawshank.
Centering the show on Henry seemed apropos, as a son of Castle Rock coming back to his complicated childhood home “felt like the most Kingian of themes,” says executive producer Dusty Thomason, who created the show with Sam Shaw. King’s fans will recognize recurring tropes from his writing along with Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn), the sheriff who appeared in the novels “The Dark Half” and “Needful Things.”
To expand the existing mythology, new characters were created that “feel like they are songs in the key of Stephen King,” says Thomason. Down-on-herluck real estate agent Molly Strand (Melanie Lynskey) has a strong (maybe even psychic) connection with Henry, her childhood neighbor. Her associate Jackie (Jane Levy) is Castle Rock’s unofficial historian. And the Shawshank Kid is the show’s haunting, possibly otherworldly figure whose own narrative unravels over the series’ 10-episode first season.
“It’s just fun playing these rare strange, weird and dark characters. You don’t get more strange, weird and dark than Stephen King,” says Skarsgard, who also starred as the malevolent Pennywise in last year’s “It” and reprises the role in next year’s sequel. “Part of the allure is trying to figure out who this kid is: is he nefarious, is he manipulative, what is going to happen? All of those things are for the audience to try to figure out.”
When it comes to those King archetypes, “I don’t think there’s any handbook or pattern that you can follow to find the sweet spot,” Abrams says. “It’s not like you just say, ‘Take a schoolteacher and make him a telekinetic,’ and you’ve got a Stephen King character. The beauty of what Sam and Dusty pitched was that it felt like it was not steeped in just fandom but an understanding of the pathos required to make a character in a Stephen King world feel living and breathing — and cursed and/ or gifted.”
Then again, why anybody is still living in Castle Rock, given the decades of disasters and nightmares, is a riddle. What’s even more impressive is Molly’s one-woman mission to make Castle Rock great again.
“I was kind of like, ‘Why don’t you just move? Wouldn’t your life be easier if you just started over?’ ” Lynskey says, laughing. “There’s a lot of things that have happened there, creating a bit of a negative atmosphere. But she feels a responsibility to make things better, like she owes it to the community to do something good.”
As the show progresses, Abrams says viewers will learn why Castle Rock residents are coming, going or staying. “It’s very easy for someone on the outside to say about a horrifying and terrifying and abusive relationship, ‘Why didn’t you just leave?’ Picking up and leaving is a lot easier to say than to do.”
Castle Rock is the legendary home for scary stuff, much of it referenced in the new series. Henry looks at a newspaper clipping with the headline “Rabid dog tears through town” – a nod to the killer canine of “Cujo.” Spacek, the star of “Carrie,” is a King Easter egg on her own.
In blending fresh characters and stories with the hallmarks and DNA of the author’s works, Shaw says, “the hope was to build a show that would really reward the eagle-eyed, Ph.D-level Stephen King completist superfan and also somebody coming to the material with fresh eyes.”