“The Life of Chuck,” opening Friday, June 13, is the newest film spawned from the mind of bestselling author Stephen King. However, unlike the horror stories he’s known for, “Chuck” is more in line with the uplifting human dramas of films such as “The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile” and “Stand By Me.” Starring Tom Hiddleston as Charles 'Chuck' Krantz, the uplifting story touches on loss, sorrow and, ultimately, hope.
Kate Siegel, a veteran of modern horror genre (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Hush,” “Midnight Mass”) stars as Miss Richards, a teacher who has a profound influence on young Chuck, telling him, “You contain multitudes.” In this interview, Siegel speaks about what drew her to the project and the lessons she feels viewers will be left with.
This movie is quite a bit different than a lot of the projects that you've done—“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Haunting of Hill House”—it’s more uplifting. What did you first think about it when you got involved?
Kate Siegal: I think it's beautifully uplifting. It's very rare for a short story to make you feel like it understands the entirety of your human life. And so, there was a sense of being understood, there was a sense of connection. There was a sense of understanding that life can be hard, but we're going to be okay. And those two things are so rare to find, and even rarer to find in a novel of short horror stories.
I really felt like it was the connection that we have with each other. As an uplifting story, this is about community. It's about how we all come together and and we're part of each other.
Kate Siegal: There's a sense of connection. You know, in this movie, there is a stripping away of communication when the internet fails or the TV fails or the phone fails. And the thing that these characters reach for is human connection, face to face conversation, and that's what gets them through the hardest times in their lives. That's a very important feeling.
What was the shooting schedule like? I think I read the other day that Tom didn't shoot for long as the title character. It was just surprising how short his schedule was.
Kate Siegal: Well, on some level, it's making three mini movies, and so nobody was ever there for that long, and that helped it feel like a real ensemble. People were coming together to do their section, and then they would leave, and the next group would come and have dinner together and shoot their section, and they would leave. And it really didn't feel like there was much of a hierarchy at all.
How did you feel about how Miss Richards, the teacher, connected with Chuck and kind of impacted him?
Kate Siegal: Miss Richards is based on every teacher that we've had, a teacher that everybody has had that changes their life in one year, one conversation, one moment.
Anybody can point to a teacher that really expanded the word world for them. Miss Richards is that for Chuck, but ideally she's also that for the audience. She doesn't only take Chuck in her hands and explain what Walt Whitman means by, “You contain multitudes, I contain multitudes.” But she explains to the audience what this movie means.
Did you have a teacher like that?
Kate Siegal: I did. I had a second-grade teacher named Mr. Saracen, who I remember, before that, I thought of learning as one thing, like a series of memorization that you had to do that was like eating your vegetables. After Mr. Saracen, I thought of learning as something I was lucky enough to get to do.
Well, this is a short story by Stephen King—do you have a favorite Stephen King story or project that you are familiar with?
Kate Siegal: I I absolutely adore one of his shorter novels called “The Girl Who loved Tom Gordon,” which is about a young girl who gets lost in the woods. And it is, at its essence, a story about faith and survival. And I go back to that book multiple times a year during harder times in my life.
I write from a faith background, and you referenced faith in that novel. What part would you say faith plays in “The Life of Chuck?” Because even though the world is ending, we don't see the doomsday scenario that you might see in “The Stand” or one of those other novels.
Kate Siegal: Faith in “The Life of Chuck,” I believe, takes the form of humanism, which again, is about connection and other people, and empathy and compassion. And having faith in that, in having faith in other people is what really creates the type of world we all want to live in.
What do you have coming up next?
Kate Siegal: Well, right now I'm in New York, and I am here at the Tribeca Film Festival because I directed a film, a short film, that's in the competition for the festival. And so, I'm here promoting that my moving lightly into directing, and that should be fun.
“The Life of Chuck,” directed by Mike Flanagan and starring Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Jacob Tremblay, Mark Hamill and Kate Siegel, opens in theaters on Friday, June 13.
