In The Life of Chuck, the Scottish actress reunites with director Mike Flanagan to explore joy, grief, and everything in between.
Early in Mike Flanagan’s dense and sharply powerful drama, The Life of Chuck, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s utterly grounded schoolteacher Marty Anderson reads aloud from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”—to the detached faces of a classroom full of students who have grown as nihilistic as their parents—with a weary but ritualistic reverence that sums up the entire movie in one fell swoop: “Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” It’s a sentiment that Marty’s ex-wife Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan) understands, as she suits up for another day on the aptly coined “Suicide Squad” with the rest of the remaining medical staff across town at City General. When the end of the world coincides with myriad billboards, radio ads, and television spots celebrating a mystery figure named Chuck Krantz on his apparent retirement (“39 Great Years! Thanks Chuck!”), Felicia, like Marty, and everyone else in the world, finds herself nostalgic for a sense of comfort amid the chaos—a moment of tranquility—and it’s easy to understand why. This is a life-affirming experience in the guise of a star-studded flashy Hollywood epic about the end times. As much as her character finds peace in being present, so too does The Life of Chuck star, Gillan, find fulfillment in the glow of director Flanagan’s lens.
“I visited the set of The Haunting of Hill House and I was like, ‘Flanagan, I want to do this again,’” Gillan tells me about reteaming with her old Oculus collaborator. “It was such a lovely experience. I felt really safe and creatively fulfilled, and I just wanted that feeling again.” A few years later, Flanagan reached out to Gillan about coming aboard for The Life of Chuck, which the actress felt was the perfect project for them to reunite on. “It was just such a lovely experience on the film, because oftentimes we’re longing for the things that we want that we don’t have yet. And we’re like, I want this thing, I want the next thing. Whereas on that project, I felt really like I’m in the place that I’m supposed to be right now. I’m not longing for anything. I’m just happy in the present, and that’s quite rare, and I really like that.”
Based on a Stephen King novella of the same name, The Life of Chuck follows the extraordinary path of an ordinary man. The genre-bending fable celebrates the life of Charles ‘Chuck’ Krantz as he experiences love, heartbreak, and the multitudes found within all of us. Split into three acts, much like King’s original story in his book If It Bleeds, the movie is told in reverse, opening with what appears to be the apocalypse as we witness Felicia and Marty navigating their final days on this mortal coil. The estranged couple both separately attempt to continue on with their daily schedules as if everything is normal; meanwhile the state of California is falling off into the ocean, Florida’s flooding, the Midwest is burning, bees are going extinct, and oh yeah, to name the real crisis, the internet is down. “Everything is going down the drain and all we can say is, ‘That sucks,’” Gillan’s character Felicia says to Marty at one point in the film. “Maybe we’re going down the drain too.”
Gillan initially got her big break as the Eleventh Doctor’s quirky ginger companion Amy Pond on Doctor Who, a popular British science fiction show following the adventures of an alien vigilante and his friends from planet Earth, but the Scottish actress didn’t make the big trip across the pond until years later, when she was finally cast in Flanagan’s 2013 stunner Oculus.
“He is the whole reason that I even came over to America from the U.K.,” says Gillan. “Literally, he cast me in his film, and that allowed me to be in this country. It was just such a brilliant experience working with him. You never would have known that it was one of his first films. He was just such a natural at it. He had been an editor prior, and so he was really kind of on it with what he needed, what coverage he needed and didn’t need, and it was just really cool to see him work.”
Back before she became a director herself, Gillan learned she was capable of more than she originally thought possible while working on Flanagan’s set. “On Oculus, he had me learn a 15-page monologue about the history of the mirror,” she remembers, “And it was so difficult, I had to become a machine in order to do it. So that pushed my boundaries. I think I broke my brain afterward, but I was proud of myself, because I did something that I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do. And so I think what that taught me was that I’m capable of more than I expect myself to be, or think that I am. And so it’s about trying to push those boundaries every time, in some way.”
In the years that passed between their shared projects, both parties experienced their own overwhelming variations of success. Gillan became one of the most crucial components of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the blue-skinned alien antihero Nebula, while Flanagan established himself as the go-to filmmaker for adapting Stephen King’s literature. Given the time apart, Gillan couldn’t help but wonder if the soul of the humble director she once knew still existed within the confines of this updated titan of industry. “I was really curious; he’s completely blown up and taken over the horror genre, so what’s he going to be like?” recalls Gillan about Flanagan. “And he was the same. Truly, it was just the same. He’s such a lovely guy. He creates such a safe, inviting atmosphere and he really respects actors and what they bring to the table. So it was almost like we never left, that type of feeling.”
Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” In other words, the daily habits that we accumulate, and the tiny little seemingly inconsequential habits that we repeat are actually, in reality, the details that collectively make us who we are. Gillan hopes that after seeing a movie like Chuck, audiences might contemplate their own patterns.
“I just thought it was one of the most original things I’ve ever read in my life,” Gillan reveals about her initial reaction to the script. “Like even the structure is so unique. It’s just so cool. And it makes you ask yourself so many existential questions, and really kind of assess how you’re living your life, and reminds you that it’s temporary, and how does that affect then what you choose to do on a day-to-day basis?”
She continues, “I think it’s a very timely movie. I think it’s a very relevant subject matter, and also, these existential questions coming up I think are really, really powerful, and people seem to be really responding to them right now in this day and age. It’s so interesting, the conversations that it’s sparking beyond film. That’s what I’m most excited about, in a way, to see what happens, and what people say, and the conversations that they have with each other about how they’re living their own lives.”
In a manner that’s both refreshingly honest and adorably self-deprecating, Gillan openly pokes fun at herself for not reading as many books as she feels she should, but says she’s a big fan of King’s adaptations. Her favorite? You guessed it, a Flanagan movie.
“I definitely am a Stephen King fan, but I’m much more of a film watcher than I am a reader,” the actress admits. “My husband makes fun of me all the time because I cannot finish a book, but we’ll watch all the movies. He eats books,” she laughs. “I don’t know how he does it. But no, I think Stephen King’s brilliant, and there’ve been so many incredible adaptations of his work. My favorites are probably The Shining and Gerald’s Game. I really thought that was so creative and brilliant. Another Mike Flanagan masterpiece.”
One of the most striking differences between King’s text and Flanagan’s interpretation, funnily enough, is Gillan’s character, Felicia. In the novella, she admittedly feels more like a supporting character in Marty’s story. The adaptation presents a more fully fleshed-out Felicia, thanks in large part to a powerfully moving performance by Gillan, as well as her scribe Flanagan.
“We talked about a lot of her backstory, why she is the way she is,” she remembers. “We created a bunch of backstory for her, and her relationship with Marty. She’s in this real caretaker role in her profession, and also in her relationship with her ex-husband. I kind of ran with that, and created a lot of it for myself, just so that I knew what was going on. Really diving into why somebody might take on a caretaker position in so many ways in their life and why they do that to cope themselves. Maybe they’ve been pushed into that by their family.”
When things in the world take a turn for the worse, Gillan feels it makes sense that her character would revert to her natural caretaker modus operandi.
“I think that generally everyone’s headspace is dire. It’s not good. It’s the end of tether. Everyone’s giving up, basically. And I think because she does have that caretaker element in her personality, she’s the one that’s then trying to rally everyone and to keep moving and trying to be optimistic in a terrible situation. And I think that’s her sort of default headspace that she slips into is, like, okay, take care of everybody else. And that’s what I do. That’s what I bring to the table. And so things are really bad, but she’s trying to make it easier for everyone.”
Still, Gillan doesn’t believe her natural tendencies are the real reason why Felicia feels the need to reunite with her old lover. It’s more about who you want to be with when the world ends. Whose eyes you want to gaze into when the stars are etched out from the night sky.
“I mean, despite them not being together anymore, clearly she still takes care of him,” says Gillan. “Even in the phone call that they have, she tells him to not drink. She’s very much been that role in his life, and still is when they interact. In terms of choosing each other for those final moments, there totally could be an element of her wanting to make sure that he’s okay in that moment. But I also think that she wanted to probably be with him in that moment too, like it wasn’t purely for him. I think that he provides such comfort for her—something familiar and warm.”
She adds, “I mean, I think there’s just something really, really powerful about asking yourself the question of like, ‘If I knew that the world was ending, who would I go to? Where would I go?’ And so there was something really emotionally powerful about those two being estranged, and then choosing each other in that final moment. They still came back to each other.”
The chemistry between Gillan’s Felicia and Ejiofor’s Marty is palpable, but the actress swears they didn’t have much time to rehearse, let alone establish a firm bond.
“It was one of those shifts where, because it’s quite fragmented, everyone kind of came in and did their bit and then left,” she says. “So there wasn’t a huge amount of rehearsals or anything like that. We kind of just got thrown into it. But that was really cool. There’s something about that that worked.” Much like the mantra of the movie, Gillan found that being present with her scene partner established a mutual appreciation between the costars. “There’s a really long phone conversation between them. They filmed his side first, and they just had me in a different room upstairs, in a bedroom, on the phone. So I was with him throughout the entire scene, every single take, doing the lines. Kind of bouncing off of each other over the phone line. And then he did the same for me the next day, he came for my coverage. And so I think it’s just about being very present with each other, because there’s a world where you could film that without the real person on the other end of the line, like someone’s reading in or something, and we didn’t want that to happen.”
A very giving actor who finds strength in handing over scenes to her costars and crafting a dignified performance out of her reactions, Gillan surprised herself with the jovial tone she discovered amidst the darker subject material. “In the final moments, which you see our characters kind of go through, what I started to feel was some humor in the whole thing, which I didn’t expect,” she laughs. “I don’t really know where that came from. But that’s something that I sort of played around with a little bit, a little humor in the face of adversity, but terrified humor.”
She continues, “I think that you just have to try to be as truthful as possible with something that is such a big, out-of-the-ordinary experience. I think the truth of situations is that there are so many elements of play. It’s absurd, it’s funny, it’s terrifying, it’s upsetting. It can conjure up so many different emotions, and maybe it’s because I’m Scottish, but humor in the face of adversity is a big part of our personalities.”
Maybe the humor lies in the irony of the fact that everyone who feels like the main character in their own story in real life is, in a way, correct. King has said before in interviews that the origin for his The Life of Chuck story came from when he heard someone say, “When an old man dies, a library burns down.” There is so much knowledge and wisdom gained, and so many memories and experiences, all contained within one human specimen, that when one person dies, so too does an entire world inside of them. Even our individual lives coming to an end, figuratively speaking at least, extinguishes a universe.
“When the movie says we all contain multitudes, it sort of suggests that within everyone’s head, there’s a whole universe,” muses Gillan. “I mean, what I really believe is that we are the universe, you know? Like, there’s like a little spark of the universe in each of us, that is what life is, and that’s how we are alive.” An empathetic old soul, the actress maintains the theory that every living creature on the planet carries with it the same level of importance. “And so there’s a bit in an ant, and then there’s a bit in a human. Together, we all make up the universe.”
We are so much more than our appearance, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, and our social media presence. Inside the soul of every single living person is a plethora of connections to books and art and interests and people. If each of us is a constellation, then at the end of that life, all of those stars will be snuffed out with our last breaths.
“I feel that it’s a beautiful exploration into how to live your life,” says Gillan about the movie’s message. “It’s about asking yourself the right questions. We forget about these things because we get bogged down by these details that at the end of your life, you’re not going to think about. They will not matter, and they get in the way of the things that do matter. Like for me personally, I already know that I’m going to be lying on my deathbed, and I’m to be like, Why did you worry so much? Like, what was the point in that? Because you’re going to die anyway, and no one’s going to remember you. But that doesn’t have to be depressing. I think it’s about just really enjoying the time that we do have here, because it’s limited, and it’s not going to go on forever. Like Chuck in the movie gets talked into becoming an accountant, and not doing the thing that he’s really passionate about. Maybe it’s all about not letting that happen. Or if you do, like, finding the beauty within that. Our time is temporary, and it’s about just having a damn good time.”
Despite its gloomy premise, what really separates The Life of Chuck from other apocalyptic material that might reside within its wheelhouse is its focus on the reasons to live, not just the will to survive. This movie touches on the things that we, as a people, are living for—like letting your hair down and joining a stranger for a dance.
“I would say that it’s a little bit of an explosion of joy,” says Gillan about the film. “And that is much needed right now. It’s not a downer, basically. It’s about asking yourself these existential questions, and then choosing to fill your life with the things that you want, and joy, you know? I love all of that stuff. It’s a positive movie.”
She smiles, “Sometimes you’ve just got to dance, release those endorphins. I can’t dance as well as those two in the movie. It’s not going to look like that when I do it, but I’m going to do it.”
All Images Courtesy Of Kristen Jan Wong
