Historical fantasy ‘ 11.22.63’ tinkers with time and fate
Abrams takes on Stephen King’s JFK reimagining
HAMILTON, ONTARIO The past is catching up to Stephen King.
On a warm September afternoon, the legendary author is visiting the set of Hulu’s adaptation of his 2011 time- traveling thriller, 11.22.63, on the same day Christine rolls into town. The pristine red 1957 Plymouth Fury used in the killer-car movie of the same name is now the coolest ride in a 1963 high school parking lot, brought in from an Illinois car museum as a reference for hardcore King fans.
While the show ( streaming weekly beginning Monday) is rife with Easter eggs — and the tall literary icon smiles broadly at the sight of his automotive villain— most of the history involved is of a different ( yet still infamous) kind. With King teamed with writer and executive producer J. J. Abrams for the first time,
11.22.63 stars James Franco as Maine teacher Jake Epping, who is tasked with going back in time to stop John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
A local diner has a closet that sends people back to the same place in 1960, but Jake’s journey to Dallas, and that fateful day, is filled with obstacles, from a side mission to right a personal wrong to falling in love with a small- town Texas school librarian named Sadie Dunhill ( Sarah Gadon) — all while a stubborn past tries to keep Jake from accomplishing his mission.
“Like all Stephen’s stuff, the fantastic becomes a metaphor for reality,” Franco says. “There are opportunities that arise in your life, and are you going to take ( them)?”
Abrams was struck by the power and subject matter of King’s novel, “but I just found myself drunk with the magic of the telling of this incredible story,” says the filmmaker, whom King personally called to get on board with the adaptation, led by writer and executive producer Bridget Carpenter ( Friday Night Lights).
Just as important for Abrams as Jake’s keeping a watchful eye on the enigmatic Lee Harvey Oswald ( Daniel Webber) is the central romance: “When he meets Sadie, because you are Jake in that story, you suddenly go, ‘ Oh no, oh no,’ but you go, ‘ Yes, yes, you must.’ You want him to find that person, but he’s found her there. It’s one of the many things that made this story undeniable.”
Adds King: “I like stories about ordinary people who have to step up. And to me, James Franco has got that. He nailed it.”
Gadon says she appreciates way the show explores “how certain people come into our lives in the moment where we need them themost or certain things happen to us at the time when we can actually handle them.”
Because Carpenter wanted to keep the “epic quality and the feeling of it just being a racing train through time,” she concedes she stayed mostly true to King’s source material. Her biggest change: turning a small supporting character, Kentucky bartender Bill Turcotte ( George MacKay), into a main player who gets involved in Jake’s race to save JFK.)
King says turning the 849- page novel into a two- hour movie “would have been like when you pack everything into a suitcase and you sit on it to get it to close.”
The eight- episode miniseries makes more sense, because the story has the feeling of a full meal for the audience with a beginning, middle and end, King says. “If the people who watch it finish it and say to themselves, ‘ Geez, I’m sorry that’s over,’ then we did our job.”