The Dark Tower has had a long and winding road through production. It was supposed to be a movie, then a movie with a TV series, then canceled. Now it appears to be back, and it’s got some killer casting.
King has revealed both the main villain and the hero, Roland, are played by Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba, respectively. This would confirm the casting rumors that were floating around a few months ago. At the time, King noted he couldn’t care less about Roland’s skin color, he just wanted a good actor in the role. Also, after years of development hell, the movie found a new director and screenwriter and seems to have broken the production logjam.
The question now becomes how they’re going to adapt what might arguably be the one of the stranger fantasy series in American literature. King’s novels, drawn from a line from King Lear and a poem it inspired, mixed elements of Westerns, alternate realities, postapocalyptic science fiction, horror, and even metafiction, with Dark Tower books having ties to a fair chunk of King’s other work and his personal life to boot. Some are speculating this is a prelude to a “shared universe” of sorts, but that seems even more ambitious than the current plans for the series.
We’ll likely learn more soon. If they’re casting major roles, a full announcement seems likely, perhaps at San Diego Comic-Con. Until then, let’s just all imagine Idris Elba fighting talking lobsters, because that happens in the second book.
(Via Twitter)
