Well, here’s a casting coup for the books.
Bill Skarsgård, former star of Hemlock Grove and the actor tasked with embodying the demonic Pennywise in Andy Muschietti’s It, has climbed aboard Castle Rock, Hulu’s psychological drama coming by way of J.J. Abrams and Stephen King.
First reported by Variety, what makes Skarsgård’s addition particularly noteworthy is that this is now his second King adaptation after It, and fans of the literary horror maestro know all too well that Stephen King’s stories tend to share DNA with one another – Randall Flagg, for instance, is a character who has cropped up in nine stories hitherto, including The Dark Tower. That being said, in Castle Rock, Skarsgård has signed on to play a young man with “an unusual legal problem,” so chances are a crossover between Hulu and New Line is little more than wishful thinking – for now, at least.
The actor joins Sissy Spacek, Moonlight‘s André Holland, Jane Levy, and Melanie Lynskey for the 10-part series, one which “combines the mythological scale and intimate character storytelling of King’s best-loved works, weaving an epic saga of darkness and light, played out on a few square miles of Maine woodland.” The fact that the fictional town of Castle Rock has also featured in the likes of Cujo, The Dead Zone, and The Body has allowed the quaint Maine village to become a fixture of the Stephen King multiverse, so we’re intrigued to find out how lead writers Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason translate that time-honored legacy to the small screen.
Castle Rock is in development at Hulu and will likely be on our screens sometime in 2018. It, meanwhile, will claw its way into theaters – and into our nightmares – on September 8th.
