‘The Stand’: CBS AllAccess Gives First Look and New Details

Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand has long been held as one of his greatest stories. The story centers around numerous survivors during a world ending pandemic of a super-flu, Captain Tripps. Today, Vanity Fair exclusively revealed the latest images for the CBS All Access limited series. It also gave some new insights into the newest adaptation of The Stand.

The miniseries will not follow the chronological order of the novel, meaning the story will jump around with help from flash backs and memories.

The Survivors

Instead the series will kick off when the world has already fallen apart and the survivors are in the process of cleaning up a neighborhood full of the dead in Boulder, Colorado. While all of them are technically immune to Captain Trips, no one wants to clean up decaying bodies without protective gear. The show runners say they made the creative choice not to begin with the fall out of the infectious virus.

“King does this great thing that we made the conscious decision not to do, which is to go to the 10,000-foot view of what’s going on,” said show runner Benjamin Cavell. “That’s not a luxury that our people have. What does the apocalypse look like from the ground where you can’t see what’s happening other places, you can’t see what’s happening to other people, you can only see your subjective experience?”

We also get our first look at survivors Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo, Watchmen) who just released hit first hit single as the world ends, and Rita Blakemoor (Heather Graham) New York socialite struggling to survive in the now dead city.

Not shown are Henry Zaga (The New Mutants) who plays a deaf man, Nick Andros, who is often misunderstood. Amber Heard playing Nadine Cross, the survivor who is conflicted by her own dark wants and fears. Also not shown is the East Texas survivor Stu Redman (James Marsden, Westworld), and Greg Kinnear’s Glen Bateman, a sociology professor.

One of the central figures that we do get to see is Frannie Goldsmith (Odessa Young, Assassination Nation). The young woman discovers she is pregnant just as the virus begins to ravage the United States. She is immune but the future of her child is unknown. “We do focus very much on that story of Fran and the baby,” says showrunner Taylor Elmore. “What are a modern woman’s motivations in this position, a 20-year-old kid who is pregnant when the world ends? She’s a formidable force in this story.”

“She’s at the crossroads between that responsibility, but then also [wondering], is it cruel to bring children into a failing world?” Young said. “Is it futile if there’s no hope for humanity? Even after the virus has run its course, is it an act of cruelty to continue humanity?”

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Her odd (sometimes creepy) neighbor, Harold Lauder, played by Owen Teague, who portrayed Patrick Hockstetter in It Chapter One, is also immune and takes it as a sign that they are the last left alive in their town.

“Frannie’s very conflicted about the way she feels about Harold,” Elmore said. “Obviously, that’s a huge relationship in the book that is explored in a specific way, and we take tiny liberties with it that an actor like Odessa can use to really make that character feel modern and resonant.”

Tensions rise when Frannie and Harold meet other survivors including Stu Redman. “When we find him, he’s in a locked room in which there are people interacting with him with these hazmat suits on, and they’re not telling him what’s going on,” Cavell says. Stu had the unfortunate luck of coming into contact with patient zero. He is later taken by government officials to be studied.

Mother Abagail

The survivors all begin having strange dreams that pull them in different directions. Whoopi Goldberg plays Mother Abagail, who appears in the dreams and later leads many of our survivors to Colorado. “She is very, very righteous and very good. But really flawed I feel,” said Goldberg, who had wanted the part when the first miniseries was produced. “I’ve been fighting with not making her the Magic Negro because she’s complicated.”

“She doesn’t listen when God is talking to her. And she tends to go her own way because she’s been like this her whole life,” Goldberg said. “It takes her a little while to figure out that there’s something bigger than her.”

Randell Flagg

The central villain of The Stand is Randell Flagg (played by Alexander Skarsgård), although he looks human, there is much more to him. In the novel, the denim outfitted Walking Dude, seeks out survivors to follow him into the desert. More specifically, he is starting a community in Las Vegas.

“He’s so charming and he’s so handsome, and so powerful—I mean genuinely powerful, able to perform these sort of miracles where he could levitate himself and he has these actual powers,” Elmore said. “And yet he needs this adulation and this kind of worship from these people whom he’s summoned to him. He needs to have them make a show all the time of how grateful they are to him.”

“There are stark differences between Flagg and certain other people we could allude to,” Elmore says. “Flagg is so beautiful, he is absolutely a lion-like God figure. With perfect hair and…and also, there’s a softness to Alex’s performance that I think is fascinating. Alex just plays it where you feel not only sympathy for this character, but you hopefully understand why it’s so easy for people to gravitate toward him. He’s just magnetic, he’s just absolutely fascinating to watch. He’s galvanizing as a leader.”

Nat Wolff (Death Note) will play Flagg’s right hand man, the survivor Lloyd Henreid. When things fall apart Lloyd is behind bars for murder and robbery. Cavell says that Lloyd is the opposite of Stu, having also been forced to watch the fallout while being stuck somewhere out of his control.

“It’s like, what would happen if you had to witness the apocalypse from inside a locked room?” Cavell said. “At a certain point there’s a riot going on in the prison around him but he’s restricted, essentially, to the view that he has just out of his cell because that’s all you can see.”They are pulling apart into two groups, who view each other first with suspicion, then with contempt, and they don’t see things the same way at all.”

As for how well the series will do, author Stephen King isn’t sure. Although it seems people like to lean into fictitious horror story during times of great stress. “Whether or not anybody will want to watch it in the aftermath of coronavirus, I don’t know,” he said. “The book is selling—The Stand, the novel, is selling—so…”

Constant Readers and watchers of Stephen King’s long history of works have been wanting an update on the original 1994 TV miniseries. The premiere date for The Stand has not been announced, however, it is expected sometime on CBS All Access later this year. Be sure to follow ScaryNerd for more of all things horror!

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