You remember The Dark Tower, don’t you? That seven or nine volume epic that began with a simple tale of a Gunslinger chasing a sorcerer through a low-magic world and ended with Stephen King losing his fucking mind. 

You remember the Gunslinger, right?

You remember how Stringer Bell was cast as Roland in a 2017 movie that crammed random elements from the books into a low-budget production by Akiva Goldsman?

Did I mention that Akiva Goldsman also wrote the screenplay? Yeah, you forgot too, huh?

You’re welcome.

We Have A New Roland Now

Word has come down from Variety that Amazon has cast Sam Strike as the Gunslinger in a pilot episode of The Dark Tower.

Strike is a relative unknown with a few appearances in television shows including Nightflyers which we told you fucking sucked. He is also going to appear in the HBO mini-series Chernobyl which looks pretty amazing and drops in May.

I think this is perfect casting, he’s got a very narrow face which can look gaunt at times and his hair cuts are always straight from a Deadwood saloon.

We Also Have A New Man In Black

Cast alongside Strike is Jasper Pääkkönen as The Man In Black AKA Walter AKA Randal Flagg AKA Sauron. That last one is not confirmed but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Pääkkönen is a little more experienced, having shown up for many episodes of Vikings and most recently in BlacKkKlansman where he probably played some racist dude.

This also looks like some good casting, his beard game just screams devious malevolence. 

If you are asking yourself, “Hey, aren’t they a little young to be playing these characters?”, you’d be right. What this means is that this pilot and the entire show will be based on the fourth novel in the cycle, Wizard and Glass. This is the only book where Roland appears this young. 

From the official summary:

Roland recounts his tragic story about a seaside town called Hambry, where he fell in love with a girl named Susan Delgado, and where he and his old tet-mates Alain and Cuthbert battled the forces of John Farson, the harrier who—with a little help from a seeing sphere called Maerlyn’s Grapefruit—ignited Mid-World’s final war.

This was an excellent book and returned to the tone of the first two books before it took a detour into cocaine-induced insanity in The Wastelands.

Could they be actually telling the entire Dark Tower series chronologically?

In any case, I think Amazon is off to a pretty good start with both the source material and the casting.