The world has countless stories about falling in love, but Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story is one about staying in love, even after one member of a couple is gone forever.
In the Apple TV+ series debuting June 4, King starts at the end of a romance, exploring where devotion took Lisey and Scott Landon—what it cost them and what it gave them. King being King, he weaves a stalker thriller and an otherworldly supernatural mystery into his heartfelt love story.
The show, based on his 2006 novel, stars Julianne Moore as the widow of a world-famous author (Clive Owen), who over the course of his turbulent life discovered a passageway into a parallel dimension that helped him tap uncanny creative energies. His secret was only shared with her, although she struggled to understand it when he was alive. Now that Scott has passed away, there are outsiders willing to do anything to gain access to the unpublished materials he left behind, even if it means destroying the woman who meant everything to him.
King usually takes a hands-off approach to adaptations of his work, but he wanted to keep this one close. The author wrote the script for each of the show’s eight episodes himself, then went in search of a home for them. J.J. Abrams agreed to produce through Bad Robot Productions, assembling an A-list cast led by Children of Men costars Owen and Moore, with Moore also signing on as an executive producer. Abrams recruited filmmaker Pablo Larraín, best known for 2016’s Jackie, to bring a story set largely within the title character’s head onto the screen. “He directs in a kind of hypnotic, inside-out way,” Abrams said. “His approach lent itself well to a story that, at the core of it, is a very, dark and twisted adult fairy tale.”
Lisey’s Story is special to King in part because it’s inspired by his own 50-year marriage to novelist Tabitha King, a few actual brushes with death, and some terrifying, almost unbelievable, close encounters with real-life stalkers. It hardly gets more personal than that, even if his experiences aren’t the norm. He doesn’t call this story a valentine to his wife, but writing it was a way of saying he sees what she goes through. The series even includes a new sequence that’s drawn from an insult Tabitha weathered not long ago after making a donation to charity.
Read more of the Vanity Fair article HERE.