The Long Walk is the latest in the long list of Stephen King film adaptations, following 2024’s The Life of Chuck and 2025’s The Monkey. Though the dystopian novel it’s based on — published under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman — came out five years after he exploded onto the scene with Carrie, it was actually the first full novel King wrote. He started it during his freshman year at University of Maine around 1966, and the story is often seen as a critical metaphor for the Vietnam War. In its alternate version of the U.S., there’s an annual competition where 100 young men must walk at a consistent pace of four miles per hour or else be killed for receiving too many warnings. Only one can survive, and that winner gets whatever he wants for the rest of his life.

The movie version is set in a totalitarian post-apocalyptic future and maintains those painful scenes of boys having to walk endlessly and find comfort in each other in their quests to get rich. Nobody knows torturing young people in post-apocalyptic futures better than director Francis Lawrence, who has helmed every Hunger Games installment since Catching Fire.

Jordan Gonzalez, best known as trans guy Ash Romero from Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, plays Harkness #49. Harkness is an observant teen and journalist who aspires to be a novelist. He maintains a journal to compose a novel based on his experiences.

We spoke with Gonzalez in a Zoom interview about how he got the part of Harkness, how he made the character uniquely his own, and his desire to examine various facets of the human experience shaped by his own. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Rendy: How’d you land the role of Harkness?

Jordan: I had heard about The Long Walk from one of my acting coaches, and she was like, “Hey, have you heard about this project? There’s a bunch of guys that you’re right for.” And I was like, “No, I haven’t.” I looked into it and I went, “Shit, I want to do this.”

Lucky enough, I got an audition the following week. Originally I had auditioned for Olson, sent in my tape for him, and got an immediate response, “Hey, Francis really loved your take. Would you be open to reading for Harkness?” I was like, “Of course. Absolutely.”

I auditioned for Harkness, then went into a director session. Honestly, I just knew that this was going to be a cool moment for me to flesh out who I thought he was and while also trying to stay as true to who the fans thought he is as well and honoring that. Plus, no one is a better Olson than Ben [Wang] and everyone landed exactly where they were meant to!

I had two days to turn it around, but in those two days, I walked, I learned my lines, and I fleshed him out walking. I wanted to get his cadence while walking, while he’s out of breath at night when he’s scared. It was a cool experience to build someone from the ground up while also stretching myself physically, mentally, emotionally in a lot of ways.

Rendy: Tell me about your walking process and how it influenced your development of Harkness and his journalist identity?

Jordan: He always, to me, was the audience. He doesn’t speak a lot, he observes a lot. And for me it was a way for the audience to see through his lens. So I would write my lines as I was walking in my own journal over and over and over again and how that would feel actually physically walking at that pace while continuously trying to write, which is so difficult.

And for me, his walk is fast, silly, goofy while also making sure he’s playing by the rules so that he lasts as long as he can, so that his book can make it out alive. But I would walk at night with little to no clothes on, trying to get the temperature and how that would feel like. And walking through strange neighborhoods to feel scared and threatened by something. I had a lot of coyotes in my neighborhood at that time, and so I would pass by packs of coyotes as if maybe that were the Major and his men and a lot of things like that, which really helped inform me on the day.

Rendy: What was it like going from your small screen experiences on Pretty Little Liars to, is this your first feature?

Jordan: It’s definitely the first, and it’s definitely the biggest. I did a short film anthology that lives as a feature, but my portion in it is a short, so technically, yeah, it’s a feature.

Honestly, I was a little intimidated. I had no idea if it was going to be different, and it was different in such a beautiful way from the day that I got there and walked into the prop warehouse. It was like just tables upon tables of old vintage items where we were allowed to, and honestly pushed, to walk through those rows and see what called to us and each of our characters about what they would have specifically in their bags. It was the same sort of thing walking into the wardrobe room; there was this big board of inspiration of 1950s Stand By Me-esque photos and just racks of clothes.

And it was not, “Hey, this is what we think you should wear.” It was, “Hey, what do you think he would wear? And what variations of that wardrobe do you think he would wear throughout the walk? What do you think he would wear when he dies? What do you think he would wear when he’s cold or hot, when it’s raining? What would he have in his bag to fidget with?” And of course, for me, the big thing is the journal, which I still have.

[Here, Jordan shows off his journal from the movie that features handwritten notes, a dead flower, and a 7 of spades card]

Rendy: Oh my Goodness.

Jordan: I was lucky enough to bring it with me, and it’s filled with things that I actually wrote. As if I was him. And for me, Jordan, this is a little nod to me. The number seven has always followed me in my life. And whenever I’m on the right path or the universe is telling me that things are going well, that number always pops up for me. And funny enough, I am number seven on the call sheet.

Rendy: Wow, that’s beautiful. That’s fate right there.

Jordan: It was fate and it lined up that way. I have this dead flower, which is from a conversation that Francis and I had while building him out. I thought Harkness to me is the pure light of innocence and a little naive of a young kid who just wants his work to live past him, whether that’s him dying on the walk or him living in the world he lives in that’s limiting him. His book is more important than his life, and his legacy is more important than him. And so I would see all of those little yellow flowers all throughout one of the plains.

Also, tying into the Vietnam War aspect of peace and journalism, journalists are always trying to tell the truth and be peacekeepers. And that image of people like hippies in the ‘70s handing out flowers to try to create peace really stuck with me. I saw that imagery, and I was like, that’s perfect. And so I was like, “Hey Francis, how do you feel if Harkness starts with a flower tied into his jacket pocket? And as he dies, the flowers die, and as he’s starting to unravel and starting to really realize what he signed up for, the imagery of the flower is there as well.” And of course, by the time he ‘gets his ticket,’ the flower’s no longer on his jacket pocket. It’s sort of like a loss of innocence and understanding has gone with that flower, and he gets to go back home.

TV is a beautiful medium. It is so fun to do, but it is formulaic. You get to dive so much deeper, and really build out all of these things, because there’s time that allows it in film. And that was just the coolest thing for me as an artist that I had not gotten to do yet. I do for all of my auditions, but I hadn’t got to do it yet where it lives somewhere forever.

And so for me, of course, my love for TV and PLL, I will always be so grateful for that show. They took a chance on me when I had just started. I had not done anything, nor did I know that I wanted to act. And they plucked me out of obscurity and gave me this opportunity to be on this fantastic show with all these incredible actors who had been doing it for years. Without them giving me the opportunity to really learn as I went, I don’t know that I would be here talking to you now about The Long Walk. That is so cool to be able to do that and to be able to stretch yourself in that way.

Rendy: Were there any activities that you guys did to lift your spirits given the bleakness of the film?

Jordan: It is extremely hard to walk 20 miles a day in the heat with that weight and shooting chronologically as well, where you either get to build these friendships with even background kids, stunt workers who walked with us every single day, and one day they don’t get to say goodbye. Seeing those familiar faces be gone without even being able to say bye to them was another added layer. When one of the characters went down, I started crying out of nowhere, and I didn’t think that it would have that much of an effect on me.

When you are so immersed in it and you see that and you feel someone’s performance, it only amplifies all of us realizing how important this all is, but also how hard it all is. And then, we all would talk afterwards about how that death made us feel. But the light side of it was that, yeah, we went on walks together, we went in Stargaze together when we were in those random places.

Rendy: What are some takeaways you felt that you learned from your experience with this movie and what would you hope  to bring along with you towards the next project you take on?

Jordan: I think I have the confidence to really throw ideas at the wall and try different things. And I think that’s something that I am learning as I grow as a human and also as an artist. I’ve only been doing it for five years. And again, I didn’t know I would ever be doing this. I never grew up thinking that I wanted to be an actor. I was an athlete my entire life. And when I started doing this, I completely fell in love with it. And for me, I love playing with the raw human experience. And I think that the throughline from Ash to Harkness is like each of them have a lot of heart and a lot of truth and a lot of honesty in who they are, but they exist.

Ash has a lot of worldly flaws against him, Harkness has a lot of worldly flaws against him that shaped them as young men. And I think for me, I want to continue to flesh out all of those different versions of the human experience and what that looks like and really dig deep into different versions of how the world affects different people.

Rendy: What are some different genres you’d like to explore in the future?

Jordan: I love-hate this question, because I’ve just started, so there’s so much I want to do.  I love Heath Ledger. And for me, he is and was such a beautiful person who was able to do so many different things. And I think for me, because of my lived experience, I don’t want to be pigeonholed, and I want to be able to play a villain, and I want to be able to play a rock star, and I want to be able to play a superhero, and I want to be able to play the bleeding heart, romantic lead and all of these things because I am a fully faceted person. And so for me, I really look up to him, because he was really able to do that in all of his work. Everything is so different and everything is without bounds. And so for me, just if I’m lucky, I hope that I get to do things without bounds.

The Long Walk is in theaters now.

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On the surface, 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption and 2007’s The Mist don’t have much in common. Both share a director in Frank Darabont and are based on Stephen King novellas, but one is an uplifting prestige picture known as one of the greatest movie of all time, and the other is a somewhat forgotten creature feature.

But, despite their differences, the films are more alike than many might give them credit for. As well as the King and Darabont links, both star Jeffrey DeMunn and William Sadler and are also two sides of the same coin that explore communities in crisis and the tragedy of losing hope.

Stephen King’s Tragic, Captive Characters

Released on the very same weekend as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption overcame box office disaster to find an audience at home and ultimately became a mainstay atop the Internet Movie Database’s list of the best movies ever made. In the film, Tim Robbins plays Andy Dufresne, a prisoner wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife and sentenced to live his life in a cruel Maine penitentiary. The Shawshank Redemption was Frank Darabont’s first feature, approved for adaptation after Stephen King saw the director’s adaptation of his short story, “The Woman in the Room.” An inspirational tale about perseverance, friendship, and hope, it’s a sweeping classical drama complete with majestic crane shots, fantastic performances, and a soaring score by Thomas Newman. It bombed at the box office but netted an Oscar for best picture, eventually became a cable staple while being considered one of the greatest prison films ever made in the process.

The Mist is about a different type of imprisonment. It follows Thomas Jane’s David Drayton and his son as they take shelter in a Maine grocery store after a mysterious fog covers the town. Dangerous beasts emerge from the mist and wreak havoc, and Drayton and his fellow survivors must band together to battle not only the otherworldly threat but also their fellow townsfolk, who have been driven into mania by the apocalyptic events. Where The Shawshank Redemption is aspirational and hopeful, The Mist is a mean and gory piece of work, with some of Stephen King’s most horrific imagery.

Viewers unaware of the film’s behind-the-scenes credits might be surprised to learn that the two films share Frank Darabont as their director, since, where The Shawshank Redemption looks and feels like an Oscar-nominated drama, The Mist is more muscular. Indeed, Darabont used the same crew he worked with on the television show The Shield when directing The Mist, utilizing handheld camerawork to create an intense aesthetic. If The Shawshank Redemption courted accolades, The Mist is the work of a director eager to terrify audiences and make a statement.

Both Films Explore How People Live – and Die – Together

The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist share common themes, particularly a curiosity about how people live in community in dire circumstances. The Shawshank Redemption’s characters are strangers forced to live together in one of the most brutal prisons put to film, and the film follows how Andy Dufresne’s decision to treat each of them with respect changes their lives. His most notable relationship is with Morgan Freeman’s Red, whose friendship with Andy allows him to consider life outside the prison’s walls for the first time in seemingly years. Andy does taxes for the wardens, helps a young con earn his G.E.D., and opens a library for the inmates. They may be in prison, King and Darabont suggest, but they’re still human, and if they can treat each other with dignity, they might be able to rise beyond their situation.

Meanwhile, The Mist’s prisoners aren’t strangers; they’re neighbors. Ideally, they should be able to weather the storm together and help each other survive. And yet, fears and petty differences creep in. Brent, a lawyer played by Andre Braugher, holds a grudge with Drayton and feels compelled to take the lead. People who have grown up in the town turn on Brent and the other perceived outsiders as they experience what they believe to be the end of the world. Goading everyone into a frenzy and exploiting their fears is iconic Stephen King villain Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), who believes the mist and the monsters are God’s vengeance on a sinful world.

These respective prisons are microcosms of the world, and both showcase how people can use their time together to either help or hurt each other. Ironically, it’s the convicts of The Shawshank Redemption who – aside from a few bad eggs – find friendship and connection, while David and the few allies he finds in the grocery store barely escape the anger of their neighbors as they drive off into the mist.

The Dangers of Organized Religion

At one point in The Mist, the store’s general manager, played excellently by British actor Toby Jones, says:

Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?

Both The Mist and The Shawshank Redemption cast a skeptical eye toward organized religion, and people who use it to control others. In the former, Mrs. Carmody is a believer driven into frenzy as she cajoles people to her side and demands David’s child as a sacrifice for “expiation”— it’s one King’s most disturbing storylines, because it suggests that maybe Mrs. Carmody’s right. On the other hand, in The Shawshank Redemption, the crooked Warden Norton pushes the Bible on the inmates – “Put your trust in the Lord. Your ass belongs to me,” he says. Even as he finds use of Andy and instructs him to cook the books, he keeps up his pious facade. He keeps a plaque with a Bible quote hanging on his wall, and Darabont lingers after Norton’s suicide to watch the blood spatter on it. Andy also escapes by hiding his tunneling tools in the Bible Warden gave the inmates upon their arrival at Shawshank; in a way, Norton was right, salvation was found within.

Mrs. Carmody and Warden Norton are characters who exemplify Stephen King’s long distrust of organized religion, which stretches all the way back to Carrie and pops up in works like The Stand, and the more recent Revival. King’s works have no problem suggesting the existence of a spiritual world – although The Shawshank Redemption has no supernatural overtones – but they are more skeptical about the people who would presume to speak for God, creating two sinister villains in this exact mold.

Don’t Stop Believing

Image via Dimension Films

It’s in their respective finales that The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist feel most different, and yet, both endings explore the importance of hope, albeit from different viewpoints. The Shawshank Redemption features one of the most perfect endings in cinema. Darabont reveals that while Andy has been going about his days in prison, he’s also been planning his escape. He breaks free and his last gift is a letter encouraging Red to join him in Mexico. “Hope is a good thing, Red,” Andy writes, “And no good thing ever dies.” Red gets his parole and hops on a bus to find his friend; the film’s last shot is the two reuniting on the beach.

The Mist’s ending is changed from King’s novella – although, interestingly, the final word in King’s short story is “hope,” ironic for one of the bleakest and most shocking endings put to film. David and his friends escape the grocery store and drive into the mist, only to find the world overrun by gigantic, Lovecraftian beasts. After driving for hours, they run out of gas. There are five people in David’s car; he has a gun with four bullets. David kills his companions – including his young son – and then stumbles into the woods to let the monsters take him. Moments later, the mist clears, and the Army arrives; had he waited, everyone would have been saved. It’s a brave and disturbing ending, and it’s no surprise audiences didn’t respond kindly to the bleak denouement.

And yet, in both films, Darabont and King explore the crucial role of hope in life’s darkest times. The Shawshank Redemption is the optimistic side of the coin. As difficult as things get for Andy, he never loses hope. He perseveres and spends time caring for his friends, planning his escape, and looking forward to his future on the beach. The Mist is angrier and more cynical; made shortly after the invasion of Iraq, it found Darabont in “a mean mood.” He depicts a world that is brittle and susceptible to chaos, and the movie finds him wondering whether humans can work together efficiently enough to stay alive – and what it might look like for his characters to believe they had lost all chance of survival. One film ends with a moment of triumph; the other in tragedy. Taken together, The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist are, respectively, an encouragement and a warning to never give up hope.

“Every frame has something unnerving in it,” Patton Oswalt says in the trailer for Chain Reactions—a new documentary about the enduring influence and impact of 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Tobe Hooper’s grisly classic has often been imitated and has spawned some regrettable sequels and remakes, but the original remains a uniquely terrifying product of a very specific time and place, not just in pop culture, but also in the realms of independent cinema.

A new trailer for Chain Reactions is here, and it gives you a good idea of how it’s structured, focusing on five Texas Chain Saw fans in particular. Along with Oswalt, there’s Stephen King, Takashi Miike (director of Audition and Ichi the Killer), horror scholar Alexandra Heller-Nichols, and Karyn Kusama (director of Jennifer’s Body). As Texas Chain Saw‘s creepy hitchhiker might say, “A whole family of Draculas!”

It’s helmed by Alexandre O. Philippe, whose other films-on-film include Doc of the Dead, Psycho study 78:52, Memory: The Origins of Alien, and Lynch/Oz.

“I think of it as a role model,” Miike muses, noting he first watched Texas Chain Saw at 15 and realized what he wanted his future career path to be. With the IP’s rights holders making headlines recently—teasing all the big names in the running to make another version of Hooper’s tale—it seems we may see yet another version on screens eventually.

Still, as Chain Reactions will no doubt make crystal clear, there’s no duplicating the eerie, gritty quality that makes the original such a standout. Anyone can make a movie about a cannibal family running a roadside barbecue joint; anyone can don a human-skin mask, grab a chainsaw, and call themselves Leatherface. But it takes a rare film to infuse a story like that with such a documentary feel; it makes the audience think they’re peeping in on a nightmare that’s both awful and totally plausible. It’s also visceral as hell: you can practically smell the rotting interior of that iconic farmhouse and feel the drop of Grandpa’s shaky hammer come down on your own skull.

In other words, we’re more than excited to see this documentary—and then rewatch The Texas Chain Saw Massacre again. And again.

Chain Reactions opens in New York and Los Angeles September 19; according to Deadline, it will expand to more cities September 26.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.