John Cusack wants the lead in the adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

John Cusack has not exactly been the A-list star he used to be. His last big studio film was the lackluster THE RAVEN. He has steadily appeared in a lot of movies in supporting roles including THE PAPERBOY and GRAND PIANO, but nothing quite on par with his career resurgence in the late 1990s. But, Cusack did find moderate success in the Stephen King hotel horror movie 1408 and is currently set to star alongside Samuel L. Jackson in another King adaptation, CELL. But, there is another project from King that Cusack would love to appear in.

During a recent Reddit AMA, Cusack was asked which role he would “accept in a heartbeat” to which he answered: DOCTOR SLEEP. The popular novel was released last year and serves as a direct sequel to THE SHINING. Movie fans know the Stanley Kubrick adaptation well and it regularly tops all sorts of movie lists. THE SHINING as a novel deviates from the film, but the sequel focuses on the adult Danny Torrance who was menaced by his father and the ghosts at the Overlook Hotel. The sequel finds him years later dealing with another evil.

Young psychic Danny Torrance has become a middle-aged alcoholic (he now goes by Dan), bearing his powers and his guilt as equal burdens. A lucky break gets him a job in a hospice in a small New England town. Using his abilities to ease the passing of the terminally ill, he remains blissfully unaware of the actions of the True Knot, a caravan of human parasites crisscrossing the map in their RVs as they search for children with the shining (psychic abilities of the kind that Dan possesses), upon whom they feed. When a girl named Abra Stone is born with powers that dwarf Dan&’s, she attracts the attention of the True Knot&’s leader—the predatory Rose the Hat. Dan is forced to help Abra confront the Knot, and face his own lingering demons.

DOCTOR SLEEP is not currently optioned or in any sort of development as a movie, but Stephen King novels don’t tend to sit idly by for long. There is already a television series based on THE SHINING in development, but a big screen sequel may work since this would be coming from King himself and not some studio screenplay machine. The novel is different, tonally, from THE SHINING, but DOCTOR SLEEP would make for one hell of a movie. Plus, Cusack definitely looks more the part these days and could pull off the alcoholic, tormented Danny Torrance.