‘Castle Rock’ On Hulu Interview: Showrunners Sam Shaw And Dustin Thomason

Since the moment it was announced, Hulu’s Castle Rock has been cloaked in mystery. Rumors have flown back and forth in forums and social media surrounding its format, plotlines, and ties to other beloved Stephen King properties, so we went straight to the source to get some clarity. Decider spoke with Castle Rock showrunners Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason about their highly anticipated project, the first three episodes of which are now available for the world to watch on Hulu.

DECIDER: What kind of anthology series is Castle Rock going to be? Do you bring back the same characters, is it a different timeline, do we jump to Derry, [the nearby town from IT]? Can you shed any kind of light on what people can expect if there are future seasons?

Sam Shaw: in the spirit of Bad Robot, we like to remain as arcane, mysterious and occult as we can be about every creative choice at all times. [Laughs]

The plan for the show, in the beginning, was to tell a different kind of original Stephen King story every season. This season is a ten hour story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we hope we will have a satisfying conclusion to all the trajectories that get introduced. This one is written under the influence of some particular Stephen King novels and stories. The great crime and punishment stories: Shawshank, Green Mile, and some of the stories that are set around prisons and death row. But next season is sort of fair game. So it may mean that here and there characters will return, but it will be its own self-contained story that might take place in the present or the past, it may be a slightly different sub-genre of Stephen King story, but it sort of exists under the larger umbrella of the series and kind of explores all the various dark corners and crannies of Stephen King’s library, and particularly looks at this town of Castle Rock as the geographical dead center of Nightmares & Dreamscapes.

Dustin Thomason: Stephen King is obviously a writer who returns to some of the same place with different novels and even on occasion pops back in and checks in with some of the same characters. So I think we view that as a real opportunity to do it in the King-ian way and in a way where hopefully it will surprise and delight fans in the same way that it does when you come across Father Callahan in The Dark Tower after having read about him in Salem’s Lot.

It has kind of got the mark of a “puzzle box” show in that it sets up all these mysteries. Are those things that you want to wrap up by the end of the first season or do you think that anything will be left dangling for future storylines?

Thomason: The short answer is that we fully intend to answer those, or to give the audience the opportunity to understand the story that we are telling in this season. So all of those are essential questions from the very beginning. We always intended to answer at their core level by the end, but there were a couple along the way that need to be explored over the course seasons to come. But in terms of the core questions, that’s how we kind of think about the anthology. We want to give people a 10-hour Stephen King inflected novel in the form of television.

Shaw: Part of what’s fun about that, having worked in longer series TV, is that you can kind of arrange your story so you don’t leave anything on the battlefield by the end of the season. There is a kind of pleasure in not having to worry about preserving story or preserving sets so you can return next season. It’s a chance to burn all the furniture, literally and metaphorically.

Speaking of all the Stephen King references, is anything we see going to have a connection to The Dark Tower, the Man in Black, that sort of through-line throughout King’s work?  Are you setting up some kind of master connectivity to that story?

Shaw: (long pause) I feel like there are some questions we are going to have the liberty to answer in a straightforward way and some that we will not. 

Thomason: I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, but there is a great artist who did a map of all of the connections among the characters in the Stephen King universe. Certainly the Dark Tower sits on that map, and some of the connections are amazing, and that was sort of what brought us to the project in the first place. Not just to look at Castle Rock, this place that has been revisited again with all these terrible things, but also to embrace the interconnectivity that Stephen has been creating all along. Not even getting into the specifics, that was definitely a big part of honestly where we started.

I was really struck about how it felt like this was a horror story about the small town American dream kind of failing; you see the dwindling chances, the dying dreams, the corruption beneath the surface. It reminded me a lot of Twin Peaks and Sharp Objects and a lot of those shows that look at the rot that’s happening in America. Was that intentional? 

Shaw: Well, I think yes. You bring up Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks is an interesting case, like a lot of critics have pointed out, there is a sort of romance of the small town in the original Twin Peaks run, back in the early ’90s. The town looked really different when David Lynch returns to it after all those decades: it is a darker vision of small town America.

We spent a lot of time, actually, talking about exactly those questions. Like, one question was ‘Where do we find this town of Castle Rock when we arrive?’ There is a tendency I think, sometimes, in adaptations of Stephen King books and stories to embrace this kind of Norman Rockwell, whitewashed picket fence, kind of “lobster in every pot,” quaint, small town vision. I get why everyone likes to see the story of the original sin, but that’s not really what Castle Rock is in the Stephen King library. It’s a weirder vision. It’s a vision of this town that has just been on the wrong side of history for decades.

Part of what seemed exciting to us was being able to really imagine this town as a sort of apotheosis of what it is to be in a small town in America where the bottom is falling out. And a small town that is ruled by the things that it is afraid of, not its hopes and aspirations for the future. If there was any kind of broader cultural — I wouldn’t say a thesis statement — but a broader cultural idea that had interested us, that was it.

Thomason: Yeah, and I think even from a production design end and thinking about how we put together the production of the first season, it was really trying to find a place that felt like Castle Rock circa 2018. It would feel beaten up by time in the ways that we hope it does on screen and that we have some of the charms of small town life and people hanging on to the last embers of that. But it still would photograph in a way that was really, as you say, kind of a meditation on the destruction of the American small town.

The cast is really extraordinary, top to bottom. How did you guys decide to cast Bill Skarsgard? Because I know that he was coming off of IT around the time this was in production, does his character have any connection to Pennywise? Or were you concerned that connection would be made by audience members watching it?

Thomason: If we answer that question… I mean, no. It’s a funny thing because when we started talking to Bill in the first place, we had been fans of his and hadn’t seen IT, because the movie was still 6 or 8 months from coming out. I think Bill felt that the character he was playing was exciting and interesting enough that he was really ready to take the leap with us. We really loved him before we knew anything about his performance as Pennywise besides having heard kind of vague rumors that he had been great, which was not a surprise to us. I suppose it is a happy accident of the success and timing of that movie. But it wasn’t because we had seen the movie and seen him as the clown and decided to cast him.

And the other star, Andre Holland, he is amazing in this, he is amazing in everything. How did you know that he would be the perfect Henry Deaver?

Shaw: In terms of Andre, that was one of the crucial things for us in terms of casting. It’s like, in some ways, it is an unorthodox genre show. At least initially, out of the gates, it is not a kind of “shock and scare” horror show, as you point out. It is really kind of an uncanny mystery show, there are some existential mysteries at the center of the story although things get a little harrier though as the season progresses, as you might expect. But it was really really important to us that it be a credible, character driven show, filled with actors that don’t really play the genre, they don’t have perceptions of themselves in a genre story, potentially a supernatural story. Now Andre Holland is just an incredible, deep, subtle actor with huge humanity and integrity and intelligence to everything he plays, so that was what was really fun, from an aesthetic standpoint, to think about what would it look like and feel like to make a Stephen King show in 2018, and then cast it with actors who bring that kind of nuance and integrity to the way that they approach the roles. And with Andre, or Melanie Lynskey, it was sort of a dream. And to have a director like Mike Uppendahl, who is in some ways, best known for Mad Men, which is an exciting way of approaching the material.

Speaking of Henry’s character, I was just really struck how you guys managed to use racism in this series because it was a different kind than I’ve seen on TV. It’s the kind of bigotry that doesn’t act like it’s bigotry, but it is very condescending and pernicious and overwhelming and you can just see it through his eyes again and again. What do you guys think about that? 

DT: It’s always been an interesting aspect of writing the show about the state of Maine that Stephen King has been doing for so long, that Maine is the whitest state in America. And I think that, the fact that so much of the background and a lot of the other actors are caucasian, part of that was that it is so, essential in a way, to what Maine is, in terms of the demographics. And I think for us, we were just really interested in the idea of what it is to find yourself in a place where people austensibly, and at least on the surface, nice and can be supportive, but where there are these deepheld and complicated feelings about people, and not just because of their race, because of their history, because of their family, and kind of bring that bubbling unease to the surface. And so that was kind of the same approach that we thought about when we were putting an African American guy in a story that was sort of set in the whitest place in America.

SS: Yeah, and in a way, he is both an insider, having grown up in this town, and he’s always been treated like an outsider, and that was an interesting point of view and a different aspect to the way he has constructed this character was something that was interesting to us. And it also felt like, if youre telling a story that is not just a kind of an homage to the great poet laureate of horror and the uncanny but who also writes about fear, and about scapegoating, about ‘othering’. There is an opportunity to examine fears and misgivings and petty racisms in a small town that we were really interested to explore.

Stream Castle Rock on Hulu