The Life of Chuck: Tom Hiddleston, Mark Hamill to star in Stephen King adaptation from Mike Flanagan

Deadline has reported that Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill will star in The Life of Chuck, an adaptation of the short story by Stephen King. Mike Flanagan, who has plenty of experience with Stephen King adaptations, will direct The Life of Chuck.

Based on the short story from King’s 2020 anthology If It Bleeds, “The Life of Chuck is three separate stories linked to tell the biography of Charles Krantz in reverse, beginning with his death from a brain tumor at 39 and ending with his childhood in a supposedly haunted house.” Tom Hiddleston will play Chuck, with Mark Hamill playing Albie. Deadline says that the project will “draw tonally from Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redeption, and The Green Mile.” In addition to directing The Life of Chuck, Mike Flanagan will also write and produce through Intrepid Pictures. The script has been in development for several months and was reportedly completed before the WGA strike began.

As I mentioned above, Mike Flanagan already has a few Stephen King adaptations under his belt. Not only did he write and direct Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, but he’s also set to develop the series adaptation of The Dark Tower for Amazon Studios. Flanagan actually secured the rights to The Dark Tower before he made a deal with Amazon. “Predating our deal with Amazon, we acquired the rights to The Dark Tower, which if you know anything about me, you know it has been my Holy Grail of a project for most of my life,” Flanagan said. “We actually have those rights carved out of our Amazon deal, which doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t get behind it at some point — you don’t know. But that’s something we’ve been developing ourselves and are really passionate about finally getting it up on its feet at some point.“

The Life of Chuck will be the first time that Tom Hiddleston will have worked with Mike Flanagan, but Mark Hamill will appear in The Fall of the House of Usher, a horror series Flanagan developed for Netflix. Details on Hamill’s character remain mysterious, only that he plays “a character surprisingly at home in the shadows.“