Dream Casting The Rest Of 'The Dark Tower'

By Petr Navovy | Miscellaneous | March 2, 2016

So we all heard the news and lost our collective shit yesterday over sai King’s tweet:

It's official: The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. #DarkTowerMovie @McConaughey @IdrisElba
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 1, 2016

We have our Roland, and we have our Man in Black. Finally. After all these years. Some people on the internet of course decided to be outraged about the colour of Roland, but they’re silly and should be mostly ignored. Not only will Idris Elba do an incredible job of playing the weathered last gunglinsger, our own Steven Lloyd Wilson pointed out just why his being black can make things even better.

The point is: it’s an adaptation. The shape and form of the material will by necessity morph from page to screen. It’s the substance that is important — Roland’s bombardier blue eyes are a wonderful literary device and recurring motif in the books, but as much as they are probably one of the most indelible images we all carry from our reading, they are absolutely not what set our hearts beating or what made our imagination resonate. I guarantee that if the lack of Roland’s bombardier blues is what is preoccupying you during your viewing of the eventual movie then they have either done an atrocious job, or you just plain took the wrong thing from the books.

The material will morph. The apparent casting of Abbey Lee as Tirana (a minor character that appears much later in the series) should be clue enough that this will not be a slavish conversion of words to moving pictures — as well it shouldn’t, or indeed couldn’t, be.

So, who knows what shape this beast will eventually take. What we do know is that our Roland and our Walter are set, and they are both amazing choices. So amazing that they set my mind abuzz and the casting of the rest of the characters was all I could think or dream about all night. You guys in the thread yesterday made some great suggestions (you know who you are), so I added those to the cauldron of dreams and wishes, and stirred in a whole bunch of coffee, and cooked up a shortlist of potential candidates. You may notice that some of these choices, by nature of who the actor is, would require some slight tweaks to the plot. BUT WE’VE ALREADY COVERED THAT TOPIC SO SHUT YOUR TRAPS AND GET ON WITH IT!

*ahem*

Here we go:

Eddie Dean of New York
Aaron Paul