Karen Gillan will star with Tom Hiddleston in the newest horror movie from Mike Flanagan
Doctor Who’s Amy Pond, Karen Gillan, has joined the cast of new Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck. Thanks to an independent agreement with SAG-AFTRA. It’s one of the few projects able to move forward with casting and pre-production despite the current actors’ strike in America. Mike Flanagan, famous for his The Haunting of Hill House and Fall of the House of Usher series, is writing and directing the film. He and Gillan previously worked together on the horror movie Occulus. Then the actor starred as a woman trying to prove the role of a demonic mirror in her parents’ deaths.
The Life of Chuck is based on the three part novella from King’s collection If It Bleeds. Karen Gillan’s character in the story is still unknown. Mike Flanagan is famously loose in his adaptations of source material so it’s hard to even guess her role. The original story follows the life of Chuck, a man who as a boy witnesses a vision of his own future death and lives under the shadow of that foreknowledge for the rest of his life. The main female role in the story is Felicia, a woman in Chuck’s interior fantasy life whose world literally falls apart as the man lies dying. But with the film certain to expand hugely on the short story, Gillan may well be playing an entirely new role.
The film stars Loki’s Tom Hiddleston as the titular Chuck, with Star Wars legend Mark Hamill as Chuck’s grandfather Albie. Other cast members in undisclosed roles include Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jacob Tremblay, and Mia Sara.
Gillan will first be seen in murder mystery thriller Sleeping Dogs this December
Filming on The Life of Chuck began this month, but no release date is on the calendar yet. Before that, the Doctor Who star can be next seen in cinemas this Christmas with Sleeping Dogs. Based on the novel The Book of Mirrors, it stars Gillan as Laura Baines, the central person of interest in a cold case murder that Russell Crowe’s retired detective is in a race against his own Alzheimer’s to solve. Sleeping Dogs opens in cinemas of the 14th of December.
