Earlier this month in Los Angeles, Paste snagged a spot on the red carpet for the premiere of 11.22.63, Hulu’s latest original drama. Based on a Stephen King novel, the compelling series follows high school teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) as he travels back in time to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Of course, changing history isn’t easy, and Epping learns the hard way that the past doesn’t alwayswant to be changed.
The limited series began its eight-week run on February 15, with each episode released weekly (sorry bingers!) on Hulu. We had a chance to chat with J.J Abrams, one of 11.22.63’s executive producers, Franco and other cast members during the premiere. They talked Stephen King, playing historical figures and what they’d change about the past if they could. Here are nine fun things we learned from the conversations on the red carpet.
1. Both Franco and Abrams were fans of the book.
J.J. Abrams can cherry pick projects, and his love of the 2011 Stephen King novel drew him to work on 11.22.63. “It was such an amazing read, and I thought it would be an incredible watch, also,” Abrams said. Franco picked up the book after reading 150 mostly academic texts for his Ph.D. program in literature at Yale. “I had a chance to read whatever I wanted to read [after passing the oral exams], and this had been a book that caught my eye before,” Franco said. “It’s about 1,000 pages, but it was so engrossing. I read it aloud with my assistant, so we read it together in about a week.”
2. But actor Nick Searcy is a bigger Stephen King fanboy.
Searcy (Justified), plays Principal Deke Simmons, who supports Epping’s 1960s cover story. The actor was clearly the biggest Stephen King groupie on the carpet. “I’m a fan of Stephen King’s. I’ve been trying to get into his projects for 25 years. I came close a few times, and this one really opened up for me, and I was glad to do it.” He even revealed this great fanboy story: “In 1980, I drove from New Hampshire, where I was doing summer theater, to Old Orchard Beach [in Maine] because I heard that Stephen King was going to be on a talk show that was filming live out there. We got up at 5 in the morning, and I drove over there. I got him to autograph my copy of The Stand.”
3. On the 11.22.63 movie that never was.
When we asked Abrams why limit the show to eight episodes, we learned that movie-length was too short (and no one wants to see an Under the Dome redux, right?). “I know that [11.22.63] was something he [Stephen King] and Jonathan Demme had been working on for about a year, looking at it as a feature. Ultimately, they weren’t happy with the results, and I think part of it is that the book’s too big. The story was too detailed, and had so many kind of wonderful detours, and condensing it into a two-hour movie was something that I could see as problematic, so I asked him if he was open to a miniseries, he said yes. [Showrunner] Bridget Carpenter came on to write the adaptation, and she’s an amazing writer and producer… and she found the length that felt right to her.”
4. Australian actress Lucy Fry had to learn Russian for her role.
The Russian woman Fry (Vampire Academy) who plays in 11.22.63 just so happens to be Marina Oswald, wife of Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (Daniel Webber). We asked how she prepared for the challenges of playing a real-life character. “I read her autobiography about three times, and by the end, it was lined, and ruled and scraggly from me going through it. And I watched a lot of her interviews online.” Then came the challenge of learning a new language: “I had to learn Russian for the part. When she [Marina] arrives in the States, she doesn’t speak any English at all, so she has to learn it.” Fry says that she learned to speak broken English with a Russian accent, so we asked the Aussie which was harder for her—learning Russian or a Russian-American accent. The unequivocal answer: “Russian. Definitely.”
5. Speaking of Aussies and accents…