[Warning: Spoilers for The Stand’s seventh episode follow.]
CBS All Access’ 10-episode adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand is, like the book on which it’s based, an unwieldy beast overflowing with characters, ideas, gore, and more. Not every episode’s been a home run, but each has been enlivened by Owen Teague’s harrowing turn as Harold Lauder, a bullied teen who, in the wake of an apocalyptic pandemic, can’t stop his resentments from boiling over into violence. As we’ve noted, Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell’s new adaptation plants Harold, a supporting character in the novel, front and center, allowing his torn soul to serve as the story’s primary representation of free will as it exists in this struggle between the forces of good and evil.
But, as we saw in last week’s “The Walk,” Harold’s story ends with both a bang and a whimper, with the character shooting himself after realizing he’s been played for a patsy by Randall Flagg, who’s set up his demonic new regime in Las Vegas. Teague, who movingly conveys the myriad conflicting emotions Harold feels in his final moments, took some time to speak with us about that final scene, as well as the character insights he was able to glean from reading fascist literature and incel forums.
The A.V. Club: So, you’re dead. What was that day of shooting like?
Owen Teague: Well, first of all, it was actually three days. That sequence took us three days to shoot and it was three very long and very hard days, very cold. The production design team was so talented and they built a tree for me to be impaled on and then built this harness where I could be stable at this weird, suspended angle. My legs are all twisted up in the thing, and I thought it was really important to [emphasize] his broken leg. Stu also breaks his leg [in the episode] and it’s an important comparison, how both characters deal with that.
But yes, they had me stuck in this tree for three days and and I remember talking to Vincenzo [Natali, director] about the image of Harold being almost crucified. The whole image of the crucifixion being something that Flagg uses, but also being a kind of inverse of what we normally think of with a crucifixion. In terms of Harold’s character, it [represents] his way to some kind of redemption. Loosely used, of course, that term, because I’m not sure that he’s redeemable. But he definitely finds peace within himself or something like peace within himself in his final moments.
It was a tough three days, but I had a lot of fun, sort of. You know, going through that whole arc that Harold has at the end there where it all hits him, what he’s done and what kind of person that makes him and [the realization] of how Flagg used him.
AVC: There’s just such a range of emotions there, from the seething rage at Nadine to the sense of humiliation of knowing he’s been used to the utter loneliness.
OT: Right. Yeah, it’s the only moment where he realizes how he created all of this for himself. The rest of the time he blames everybody else. He blames Stu and Fran, in particular, the whole committee, the bullies at his school, and his parents. The responsibility of his own downfall never lies on him until the very end. And then he’s like, “It did not have to be this way. I chose to go this route.”
AVC: One of the things I’ve enjoyed about the series is how it plays up the concept of choice and free will as it exists within King’s text. Were those discussions happening on set?
OT: Yeah, and it was a really big part of just my own work at home, like figuring out Harold’s thought process in terms of Flagg and his path to Vegas and where he sits there. In the show he has a big thing with destiny. He talks about all this being destined and how he was meant to be the main character of this post-pandemic world. This was never really explored within the show, but I thought a lot about what Harold thinks will happen to him when he gets to Vegas. Like what he thinks his place there will be and how he fits into Flagg’s government.
I went very much in on the book’s image of Vegas, which is like this kind of very ordered, fascist kind of place. And I started reading all these books when we were shooting—Machiavelli and some Nietzsche and others about how to build a society, how to govern a society. And that led me to traditionalism, which sort of coincided with Hitler’s rise to power, and [I thought about how] Harold’s ideas about government were very much drawn from people like Julius Evola and Machiavelli. His idea of government and society is punishing people who hurt him, which was something that I found just dipping into the internet forums of like incels and stuff like that. But Harold takes it to a whole other intellectual level, as he does with most things.
AVC: How would you say your relationship to Harold changed over that that period?
OT: When I got the role, he was my favorite character on The Stand and in many ways still is. In a strange sort of way. I read that book for the first time when I was 13 and it’s one of my favorite books, so I was really excited when I got that role, and I think I very much empathized with Harold at the beginning. He’s so smart and so resourceful and also kind of has like a weird sort of charm, you know, in a very strange way. And I think that if he had had more courage, he could have fit right in on the committee and have been a really good person to have around. But as we got deeper into shooting and as [Harold] kind of succumbs more to Flagg’s influence, it was really odd, but I really started to not like him at all. At the end, I was glad to be done playing him because, it was weird, but I felt sort of bad about that character. That probably sounds kind of melodramatic, but he became really unpleasant and he was pretty unpleasant to begin with. [Pause.] He’s just so weak.
AVC: You can see some of that evolution in your performance, too. There’s a moment in episode six where Harold and Nadine are talking and then he abruptly chokes her. That was such a striking moment because it doesn’t feel born of Flagg, but rather an inherent misogyny that Harold has carried with him. Would you say that your ickiness with the character was related to that realization?
OT: Absolutely. There’s a parallel between between him and Flagg, where Flagg feels entitled to Nadine and Harold feels entitled to Frannie. This “ownership” thing just feels bad, I think, because it’s true, there are so many guys like that who think that way and act that way. It just felt really, really dirty to me. Everything about that kind of mindset is just gross. That was kind of the main thing that felt so icky about Harold.
AVC: You mentioned you were reading incel forums. What else did you take away from those?
OT: Well, there’s a lot of a lot of parallels on those kinds of websites between the whole misogyny mindset and the alt-right movement, which I think is where where the traditionalism philosophy kind of came from in terms of me figuring out where Harold sees himself in Vegas. But there’s also this really sad, lonely rage that all those guys have. And it’s an interesting rage, too, because it’s so self directed. It comes out at the rest of the world, but it’s really about yourself. It’s very self-fulfilling. They’ll get in these chat rooms and kind of beat each other down. But that’s what they’re there for, to be sadistically treated by the other people in those forums. It’s bizarrely masochistic and and just really, really reinforces their own belief that they are less than everybody else.
AVC: Speaking of icky things, did you get to see your buzzard-eaten face on set? Because that is horrifying.
OT: [Laughs.] I got sent some pictures of it by some of the other cast members as they were shooting with it. They put me in a head and upper torso cast. Somewhere in Vancouver there’s just a just a life-sized replica of the upper-third of my body just sitting on a shelf.
AVC: When we spoke to showrunner Benjamin Cavell, he called Harold the sort of secret protagonist of the story. Would you agree with that?
OT: Yes, in a way. I mean, he certainly was for me, but my view of people that I play is often warped. [Laughs.] It’s a different thing when you’re looking at it from inside. But Harold kind of bridges the two worlds of Colorado and Vegas. I don’t know if he’s a protagonist. He’s definitely not a real “villain-villain,” but I think he’s the most real-world disturbing of the characters on the show, because I think there are a lot of Harolds out there. It’s good to understand where he’s coming from, but I don’t know if I’d want people to side with him.
AVC: You’ve been in several King adaptations now. Did you grow up a King fan?
OT: Oh, yeah. I started reading him when I was probably 10 or 11. I just remember being in fifth grade and reading The Eyes Of The Dragon, which I’ve heard from a lot of other people is their first King book, which is funny because it’s the least horrifying of all of them. But it includes Flagg, which is fun because here I am a decade or so later and Flagg is still something that is in my life.
But I remember reading that book when I was 10 and then to The Dark Tower, which was quite the jump, going from one of his lightest books to, you know, his Lord Of The Rings equivalent. And then after I read that series, I read The Stand and then kind of just worked my way through his other novels. But he’s been one of my favorite authors for a long time.
AVC: Have you met him yet?
OT: No. I’ve met both of his sons. Owen [King] wrote on the show and then I worked with Joe Hill on another thing. But I haven’t met King himself. Maybe someday.
35 Comments
It was a great performance, but I really don’t want to hear about how hard it is to “work” outside for three lousy days.
he was suspended in a harness in the cold doing take after take, why are you pretending like that’s not work?
Ive been working with actors for almost 30 years. They tend to be pampered whether they want to be or not. Lying on the ground for ten minutes at a time(in between times they get heaters, tents, comfy chairs, and fancy coffees) can appear to be a hardship to them. Subjectivity. And one has the urge to punch up an interview with bigger adversity than was present.
I hear one of the biggest actor complaints is boredom in between takes. Or if your Danial Craig getting into James Bond shape. That seems like a reasonable greivance.
I’ve never been an actor, but I can see that boredom would be a big thing. We light for half an hour. They come in and act for ten minutes, then we light for another half hour…..or so. That’s not enough time to do anything of note in the trailer or green room, but too much time staring off into space. It’s even worse on features. It could be hours between shots.
Boredom is the worst. I think we should allow them that. I also get not having enough time to do anything constructive. That sucks too.
lol get mad sam
LOL!
Last time I went hiking with you I commented at the end, exhausted, that that hike was really hard, and you said the exact same thing to me. “It was a great performance, but I really don’t want to hear how hard it is to ‘hike’ uphill for three lousy hours,” which hurt at first, but thankfully stopped me from going on to compare the whole ordeal to working in a sweatshop in an underwater mine run by nazis, since I had already been insensitive enough in calling the hike difficult
It’s obvious Teague put a lot of work in. Harold, as detestable as he is, is the best part of the adaptation. Too bad the showrunners didn’t do the same level of effort.
“This was never really explored within the show” is, inadvertently, the truest and most accurate thing said about what the hell went wrong with this disastrous adaptation.
Yeah, when an actor gives this kind of backhanded comment it is quite telling. Years from now when he does random roles for the AVClub and The Stand comes up that will definitely be a “um, that project did not work out how I hoped” comment from him. A nine hour series based on one book (even a 1000 pager) should have been able to tell every single story in minute detail. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy and Star Wars was told in less, but the stand weirdly is too long, yet does not develop any of the characters at all, which is the entire point of the book.
And as others have noted, for all its flaws, the 1994 version was just four hours yet managed to develop its characters far better. To have more than double the run time, and god knows how much more money, and botch it this bad, is an achievement.But, this is CBS so…
Slight correction, I believe the 1994 version was 6 hours (4 1.5 hour episodes, not counting commercials), but your point stands. The ‘94 series told a much more coherent story, and left out less, than this adaptation is apparently going to even with an extra 3 hours of runtime in comparison.As for the money thing…I feel like everything about this series feels cheaper than the ‘94 miniseries, with the exception of the CGI. The bigger-name actors (Goldberg, Skarsgaard, Kinnear) seem to have so little interaction with the other cast members that it feels like most of their scenes were filmed quickly. And even if you accept that this could only be a limited series rather than a multi-season show, why only 9 episodes? Why not 10-12, or better yet 15? Feels like that was a $$$ decision.
The bigger-name actors (Goldberg, Skarsgaard, Kinnear) seem to have so little interaction with the other cast members that it feels like most of their scenes were filmed quickly.Wasn’t a lot of the production on this done after pandemic precautions were put into place?
I read that they had to rush at the very end to completely finish, but that they were mostly done by the time that things were shutting down in March of 2020.I suppose it is possible that they scheduled certain people/scenes for March and then had to rush them specifically because of the pandemic. I would be interested to find out how long certain people were on the set. (Of course, if it was NOT a financial decision or caused by the pandemic, then it’s even more perplexing that we don’t get more of some of the characters).
12 hours would have been plenty; pretty sure I read the unabridge The Stand in that amount of time.
CBS should be shown in prisons where you want inmates to feel like they are at their grandma’s house on a rainy Sunday and subdue their violent tendencies. “This is CB- Zzzzzz…”
agree. The incompetence is stunning considering this is supposed to be CBS’s “premier” content, they have a complete famous story, the cast on paper is rather good and two of King’s sons are helping adapt it..and this is what they do with it?I am reading these to see how it turns out as after watching “Picard” (man that ending was awful) and the derivative as hell “Discovery” then watching the first four episodes of this, I gave CBS all access a big “no” vote and did not renew it.
There was some discussion about that tree branch being CGI onthe ep discussion page. I guess it wasn’t. I like that Teague, himself, wasn’t sold on Harold being the protagonist. He certainly got most of the focus, though.
I can’t remember when, but you (I think it was you) said you felt like they made Harold the main character of the show. I’ve been thinking about this and I’m not sure they did that on purpose. I think that he is the best character on the show because he’s the only one with halfway decent writing and whose character has been fleshed out. They let us get to know him better than really anyone else. I just don’t feel like it was on purpose and I don’t know if it’s because whoever did most of the writing for that character identifies with Harold or if they just only remembered his character very well or what. I hate to tell Owen, but his dad wrote the better teleplay on this story by a million miles (even if he rushed the ending.) (And I do know that Owen didn’t write the whole thing. Maybe he wrote for Harold and that’s why Harold is the best written character.)
I haven’t been paying attention; is Owen King a bigger contributor to this show than merely writing an ep? I worked with Joe Hill on an unaired pilot for the attempted revival of Tales From the Darkside. Those kids really seem to have made a cottage industry out of the old man.
I don’t really know. Owen Teague mentioned he wrote for the show in this interview and I had heard he did some writing for it. I don’t think he wrote the whole teleplay or even most of it like Stephen King did for the 1994 version, though. Joe Hill looks so much like his dad! It’s insane. Is he the one that wrote Sleeping Beauties with Stephen King? That wasn’t too bad. They are a family full of writers (I think his daughter writes, too.) Just looked it up and Naomi King is not a writer, she is a minister for the UU church. And apparently genderqueer, which makes the whole kerfluffle between King and J.K. Rowling a lot more interesting.
Protagonist = hero, antagonist = villain isn’t really an accurate metaphor. If you’ll humor me getting to use my undergrad theater degree for something other than telling people their quotes aren’t Shakespeare, the technical definition of a protagonist is the character who moves the action forward, whereas the antagonist is the character who attempts to block the protagonist from doing so.
Most of the time, that still shakes out as hero v. villain, respectively, but there are some notable contemporaryish examples of it working the other way. The movie Heat, or most of the prestige TV dramas with anti-heroes in the lead. That said, there could be a creatively argued case for Flagg as the protag and Mother Abigail as the one trying to prevent his forward motion, but I don’t see it for Harold.
I appreciate the refresher on protagonist/antagonist vs hero/villain. I do sometimes focus too much on the the latter. That said: This story REALLY breaks down to Good vs Evil. In Election, you could see Broderick as a protagonist, should you wish. He was trying to defeat someone he saw as villainous. Here, you have Flagg really having no plan other than to subjugate all ( and turn everything into a live action Bosch painting). He is given a slight boost with one boot shot. (which I disagree with, bitterly) Mother Abigail, in this version, gives virtually no idea of her end goal. Harold, the creator’s “protagonist” doesn’t drive any of the plot. He kills one main character, who was incredibly ineffectual. Had he not blown up the house, MA still would have returned home and delivered her instructions. King’s protagonist has been given a decidedly back seat to the proceedings, and doesn’t count. If there’s any character on a journey, it’s Larry. And they buried the hell out of that lede, as well. Thinking about it, I have a hard time choosing ANY actual hero of this version of the story. Just people we follow for a time.
It’s great that he’s such a Stephen King fan—it always bums me out a little reading interviews with actors in literary adaptations where they’re like “yeah, I never read it” or “I read the first third once I got cast, but ….” Not that it necessarily affects the performance, it’s just that for most works that get adapted, the source material is important to so many people.
Isnt it 9 episodes?
Not for Teague
Depends. Given the way it’s been bouncing around, he could be in a flashback or flashbacks.
And I started reading all these books…about how to build a society, how to govern a society. I’m glad someone associated with the show figured out one of the fundamental questions posed by the book and delved deep into it, since it’s reasonably clear that nobody else involved with it bothered.
I think Teague’s acting as Harold is very good, and the qualms I have with it are almost entirely due to how poorly I feel this adaptation is written. In particular, I feel like his facial expressions in scenes where he’s trying to appear normal in Boulder are so over the top that I have a hard time thinking that anyone wouldn’t take one look at him and say “this guy’s up to something.” That said, since the show doesn’t bother to establish much of anything in his character development (and he’s probably the best-developed character in the show nevertheless!), I don’t know how else he really could have played it.I still feel like he’s a bit too conventionally good-looking for the role, but that’s not exactly out of place for this show.
I agree that Teague played VERY broad with his fake bon homie in this version. To be fair, though, King describes Book Harold’s smiling as overthetop as well. Several characters mention just how weird his smiling is , one worrying that if his smile got any broader, it would meet around the back of his head and his skull would topple off. He’s constantly finishing conversations with a portentious “every dog has his day” which I personally would find weird. Teague had precedence on his side, even if it was weird to watch.
The Tom Cruise picture sold it for me. Once I saw that, I got what he was doing (or what he thought he was doing). And it was a pretty good version of the creepy Cruise smile.
That’s fair. I can certainly envision it making more sense if we had more time with Harold where we could see him occasionally doing something else. From what I remember of the passages in the book, I thought it was the people who knew him best (Stu, Frannie, etc) who observed that he was acting strangely, but that the people who he met for the first time in Boulder saw him as normal. In this show, I feel like anyone who encountered that smile for the very first time, knowing nothing else about Harold, would still be creeped out, which kind of negates the idea that he was accepted and generally liked as “Hawk” by most of the Boulder folks.In the end it’s a minor quibble, because on the whole I think one of the few things that is “right” about the show is Teague’s portrayal of Harold.
He reminds me of a young Gary Oldman.