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Exclusive: 'The Stand' cast on why Stephen King's new coda was worth waiting 40 years to see
In late 2020, the Paramount+ adaptation of Stephen King's global bestseller The Stand gave a whole new generation the substantially bolstered fear of easily communicable colds. It didn't hurt that the all-too-real COVID-19 virus was there to amp up the dread in King's tale of an apocalyptic pandemic that wipes out much of humanity, where the survivors are left to wage an epic battle of good versus evil.
Starring James Marsden ("Stu Redman"), Alexander Skarsgård ("Randall Flagg"), Whoopi Goldberg ("Mother Abagail Freemantle"), Amber Heard ("Nadine Cross"), Odessa Young ("Frannie Goldsmith"), and many others, The Stand served up nine hours of story, but perhaps most important was the brand-new coda written by King. With The Stand arriving on Blu-ray and DVD on Oct. 5, the home video set includes a new featurette that has a deep dive into that extra ending, which, according to Young, offered King the chance to give some of his characters the ending he always felt they deserved.
Ahead of the home video release, SYFY WIRE has an exclusive look at the cast of The Stand discussing how important that new coda is to the final product:
As showrunner Benjamin Cavell told SYFY WIRE earlier this year about King's coda, "The thing that he was kicking himself about, and the question that this will answer, in his mind, is, 'Well, when does Frannie get her stand?' As we know, she is, what, eight months pregnant; when they leave on the stand, she can't go. But it was always, in King's mind, a deficit of the book that one of its main heroes doesn't kind of get to participate in its climax. So, without giving anything away about the coda, I will say that the thing that I think generated it or generated the need for it, at least in his mind, was that Frannie needed to have a stand of her own."
By the way, if you loved Mick Garris' 1994 ABC adaptation of The Stand, there's a The Stand 2-Pack, featuring the original Emmy Award winning 1994 miniseries and the 2020 adaptation, which drops on Oct. 5.
