INSIDE ‘OUTSIDERS’
How novel by King of horror became an HBO series
Stephen King packs a lot of story into his books. “The Outsider,” his 576-page murder mystery with a supernatural twist, was no exception. Yet by the time Richard Price had written the third episode of his HBO adaptation, he had covered half the book.
“I realized I had to make it go longer to give them 10 episodes and to do that I’d have to go deeper into the characters and introduce some who didn’t exist in the book,” said Price, an acclaimed novelist who lent his eye for the grit and muck of city life to HBO series like “The Wire,” “The Night Of,” and “The Deuce.”
The novel opens with the rape and murder of a young boy and the arrest of a beloved baseball coach, Terry Maitland. There’s overwhelming evidence — fingerprints, witnesses, video — that place him at the scene. But Detective Ralph Anderson soon learns, to his chagrin that there’s also overwhelming evidence, including fingerprints, witnesses, video that place Maitland in a different city during that time. Since a person can’t be in two places at once, and since this is a Stephen King novel, sinister forces must be at work.
Halfway through the book, King reintroduces Holly Gibney, the brilliant misfit who assisted a pragmatic retired policeman in the “Mr. Mercedes” trilogy. In “The Outsider,” which debuts Sunday, Gibney partners, uncomfortably, with the fact-driven Anderson, played by Ben Mendelsohn.
King’s novel is, unsurprisingly, a suspenseful pageturner to be read at breakneck speed. Price slows the pace, creating a character study as much as a horror story.
“A lot of other King adaptations seem to rely on the over-the-top monster and a lot of pyrotechnics,” he said, “but if the characters are not real, with the exception of the fiend, it’s not that interesting. So I wanted to make the characters as plausible and as complex as I possibly could.”
Some changes were made for practical reasons — a lengthy scene in the novel that ends with a crucial character being killed was drastically compressed. “Your screenplay is not carved in marble, it’s a 60-page memo to the people making it,” Price said. “On television that scene would have required too many setups to get all the shots from A to Z. We have to eliminate 23 letters of the alphabet. Your eye is on the clock and on the bank account.”
But Price also sought to raise the stakes. In King’s telling, Anderson’s son, Derek, was simply away at summer camp, asking to come home; in the series, Derek died of cancer, leaving Anderson and his wife Jeannie, played by Mare Winningham emotionally wounded. “It makes their relationship deeper and gives Anderson a haunted quality,” Price said, adding that King was fine with the change.
Price also sends Anderson to therapy after he shoots someone and introduces an extra set of killer and victims in New York that mirror the patterns King establishes in the book. But perhaps the most dramatic change revolves around Gibney. MRC, the production company, cast Cynthia Erivo (photo), (who just played Harriet Tubman in “Harriet”). Gibney was written as white in “Mr. Mercedes” — which was adapted for TV by fellow novelist/ “Wire” alum Dennis Lehane, who also serves as a writer and executive producer on “The Outsider.”
Gibney’s personality also underwent a change, courtesy of Price. She still seems to be on the spectrum but her quirks and tastes are different. She drinks more, doesn’t use words like “poopy,” and even develops something of a relationship with a new character.
“Holly was a certain way in the book and I wanted to reinvent her to some extent,” Price explained, adding that the changes “were not just stretching to make the show longer but to keep the spirit and art of the book but also to introduce new ideas, ‘what if…’”
Some King fans will complain, Price acknowledges. “He doesn’t have an audience, he has an army and they are very intense and passionate and will say, ‘How dare you…’ but I can’t worry about that. I’m not beholden to them.”
Price did run his ideas for Gibney by King, who seemed “totally cool with it.”
While Price’s favorite parts came when he “was chasing a void to find what happens next, when I’m out on there my own,” he ultimately views the series as a duet with King. Or, he quipped, you could call it their offspring.
“I’m the mom, Stephen’s the dad — thank you Stephen, that was so much fun.”