A pandemic that kills 99.4 per cent of the population, a deep division between two groups of people seeking to rebuild a decimated world.
It sounds like a Stephen King novel drawing straight from today’s calamities, but the horror master wrote The Stand in 1978. It was adapted into a miniseries in the 1990s but as filming wrapped on this new version in early 2020, the COVID pandemic was just kicking off.
The eerie timing of The Strand’s release wasn’t lost on Australian star Odessa Young, 23, who revealed that the cast and crew originally joked that The Stand’s American broadcaster CBS had engineered it as a marketing gimmick – this was, of course, before the world knew how serious and deadly COVID would turn out to be.
As Frannie, one of the survivors of the pandemic who is ordained as a community leader in a newly established society, Young is part of a large ensemble cast that also includes Whoopi Goldberg, Alexander Skarsgard, James Marsden, Greg Kinnear and Amber Heard.
It’s a formidable cast but Young is used to appearing across from big names. She was a child actor on Australian TV before breaking through as the lead in The Daughter , Simon Stone’s cinema adaptation of Henrik Ibsen play The Wild Duck, which also starred Miranda Otto, Sam Neil, Anna Torv, Ewen Leslie and Geoffrey Rush.
Since moving to the US in her late teens, where she’s picked up the slightest twang of an American inflection on certain words, Young has been making a splash in buzzy, acclaimed projects including Sam Levinson’s Assassination Nation and Josephine Decker’s Shirley.
She spoke with news.com.au about her experience working on The Stand, King’s insight into human behaviour and playing a love interest to Marsden, who for his ageless visage, is double Young’s age.
The Stand is many people’s favourite Stephen King novel – were you familiar with the story before signing onto the series?
I was not a huge Stephen King reader. I’d watched The Shining and John Carpenter’s adaptation of Christine is one of my favourite movies. So, when [series co-creator] Josh [Boone] called me about The Stand, I had the really exciting task of reading this tome for the first time. I got to become a fan of it.
The Stand is a sprawling story and there are lots of characters and different subplots. With all that going on, what was important to you that the audience understands about Frannie?
Some of the things that I really loved about Frannie in the book, and which we tried take further in the series was her self-discovery throughout the series, and throughout the events that she has a pretty big part of.
At the start of the story, she really has no idea and the ideas she has in our story are ones that you can see her progress into, as opposed to just meeting a character with all these foundational beliefs. I like the idea that you get to watch her figure it out.
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The Stand has such a large cast, who did you most enjoy working with?
The best thing that you can hope for is an ensemble cast with so much experience, just to learn from it.
I think one of my favourite storylines is the one between Frannie and Harold [played by Owen Teague] so I would say that because of the screen time and the amount of time we got to spend together, Owen was one of my favourite actors to work with.
It felt like each scene we did would have the same weight to it in how seriously we took it. We spent a lot of time going over them and them bringing our own depth to it. That, to me, is one of the most gratifying experiences you can have as an actor, having a scene partner who is so invested.
Frannie and Harold have such an interesting relationship because the power dynamics within it are so intriguing, but it stands in contrast to the relationship between Frannie and Stu, especially as Stu is double Frannie’s age.
I remember having lots of conversations with Josh [Boone] before we started the show and there has always been an age difference between Frannie and Stu, even in the book.
What we really wanted to get out of this is that when the world is turned upside down, people turn to relationships or people in completely different ways as they might when they have everything else to choose from.
I think in this instance, her relationship with Stu really defines that desire and necessity that she has to grow up, and the desperation that she has to find a foundation of love and care – and that is what Stu offers her.
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The series is about a pandemic that wipes out 99.4 per cent of the world’s population. Were you at all worried that The Stand coming out at this time would be too triggering for audiences?
We were still shooting when started to hear all of the reports of the coronavirus appearing in China and then the first case of it in the US was in Washington state, which is a stone’s throw away from where we were shooting in Vancouver.
We were watching it get closer and closer and it was a running joke on set that CBS had designed the virus to market the show.
I think that’s just really eerie timing and it’s a testament to how prescient Stephen King’s work is. I don’t necessarily think it is triggering because the virus in the show is so much more fatal than the one we’re currently dealing with, but ultimately I think what people respond to in the story of The Stand is not the pandemic but how society rebuilds itself afterwards, which relies so much on King’s analysis of human nature.
That’s what people really want to see from him because he has such an incredible opinion and an incredible grasp of the way that humans behave when all bets off.
That for me was the most interesting part of the show, and the parallels between how life picks itself back up again after the pandemic in The Stand and how we as a human race and certain leaders are dealing with the pandemic in our reality.
Do you think there is something that audiences can take away from The Stand in that COVID does seem to have exposed these fissures in our society and has maybe accelerated circumstances in which people are questioning how the world is built?
Something that I’ve really learnt myself throughout this past year is how heavily we rely on community, whether we know it or not.
Everybody is dealing with the consequences of isolation and having to really second-guess what responsibilities that you have for your community, for the people around you, the people that you love, and even the world you want to see.
Do you want to see a world that gets sicker or do you want to maybe sacrifice some of your personal time and personal comfort to keep the world safe?
That’s something that is at the core of The Strand, I won’t call it good versus evil or god versus the devil, but these are two sides to the same coin – what people believe their responsibility is or even if they have any.
In the event of an actual apocalypse, what do you think your most valuable skill would be?
Oh, goodness. I dropped out of high school and I never do anything except for acting so maybe I could provide some entertainment.
There’s a character in The Stand who has a dream of opening up a cinema with leftover Blu-rays. I feel like I would be able to contribute something like that, whether it’s a cinema or a travelling theatre troupe that would hopefully unite the communities that remain.
The Stand is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video
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2021-01-25 07:15:18Z
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