The best casting in a Stephen King adaptation, according to Stephen King: “He was perfect”
There aren’t many authors whose work has been as essential to the last several decades of cinema as Stephen King, and whether it’s a short story like The Shawshank Redemption or Stand by Me, or a full-on novel like The Shining or Carrie, his writing has helped inspire films that have proven to stand the test of time.
King is often vocal about the way that his own work has been adapted, having lobbed immense praise on both Shawshank and Stand by Me, while being completely unsparing in his criticism of the Graveyard Shift; nonetheless, when considering how talented he is at writing unique and compelling characters, getting to be part of a King adaptation is an opportunity that many actors have come to cherish.
Great performances in the author’s adaptations include the likes of Kathy Bates in Misery, Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone, Ben Mendelsohn in The Outsider, and Ewan McGregor in Doctor Sleep, among many others, but King himself has one performance that he told Entertainment Weekly was what he considered to be the best.
“No one will be able to top Gary Sinise, who played Stu Redman in the original ABC miniseries,” King said about the star of The Stand, adding, “He was perfect. When he says, ‘You don’t know nothing’, to the soldiers who are putting him under mandatory quarantine, you believe his contempt completely.”
The Stand is considered to be one of the most ambitious novels that King ever wrote when considering its length and density, and even though he has the reputation for being able to write very quickly, this was a more laborious process because of its complex plot and large array of characters. Stories about the post-apocalypse have now become very common thanks to the success of Mad Max and The Last of Us, but when King first wrote The Stand in 1978, the notion of the planet recovering from a destructive pandemic was considered to be revelatory and original.
Many of his novels were adapted to the small screen, and some versions, like the made-for-television production of The Shining, have not aged well at all, but The Stand was seen as the rare television miniseries that managed to capture the same detail and intensity of the novel, as it vastly outpaced the production quality of other ‘event shows’ of the era.
One of the main reasons that it connected so strongly was its incredible cast, which included Molly Ringwald, Miguel Ferrer, James Sheridan, Rob Lowe, and Ruby Dee, among others, but it was Sinise who stood out with his role as Stu, the hero who helps to unite humanity amidst the crisis.
Sinise was a relative unknown at the time that The Stand premiered, although ironically, he would end up getting much more attention a few months later as one of the co-stars of Forrest Gump, which became the year’s top-grossing film and earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’.
The Stand remains a property that has attracted the interest of Hollywood, and in 2020, a reboot for Paramount Plus debuted that had James Marsden in the role of Stu, a great actor who has often not received the credit that he deserves, but it was hard for him to live up to the legendary work that Sinise turned in 1994.
