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| Kate Siegel in The Life Of Chuck |
In Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Stephen King's short story, The Life Of Chuck, which appeared in the 2020 anthology If It Bleeds, actress and director Kate Siegel plays high school teacher Miss Richards.
The Life Of Chuck is narrated by Nick Offerman, who guides us through Chuck Krantz's (Tom Hiddleston) life in reverse. We begin with Chuck on his deathbed and end during his childhood. And somehow, the end of the world and its quirky strangeness are somehow connected to Chuck.
Siegel has acted in other adaptations by Flanagan, including Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House, Henry James' The Haunting Of Bly Manor, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher. With Flanagan, she co-wrote and starred in Hush, about a deaf and mute writer terrorised by a masked killer. She wrote and directed the short film Lily, based on a Stephen King story, and directed Stowaway, a segment of V/H/S Beyond, written by Flanagan.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Siegel discussed being curious, and the multitudes of storytelling. She also reflected on the literary heritage in shaping narrative traditions, and whether The Life Of Chuck's timeliness is a coincidence.
Paul Risker: What were Mike Flanagan's intentions when choosing to adapt The Life Of Chuck, and is there a knack for adapting Stephen King?
Kate Siegel: The Life Of Chuck is a movie about honesty — honesty about the human experience and honesty about the weight of the world that we all suffer underneath. And Mike wanted to bring to life the real human story of Chuck, which is very simple, and how it becomes the most important thing in the universe, but it's also entirely insignificant.
What's exciting about Stephen King is that so many of his stories happen in your head. He makes it a very personal feeling even though it is a very universal story. I believe the trick to the adaptation is being able to filter it through your own lens without losing the genius of his writing.
PR: King's stories more often than not explore the darker side of the human experience. Are storytellers naturally curious people with an interest in human nature?
KS: The human condition is one of curiosity. I think all people are deeply interested in how other people function and why they are the way they are. The most extreme level of that is the obsession with celebrities and wanting to know everything about them — what skincare they use, what they eat for lunch, where do they go, and what do they wear? And that goes all the way down to the intimate storytelling of Shakespeare and then even Stephen King, who writes a book like The Stand, which is not about the apocalypse or the end of the world, it's about a group of people. And so, what happens is everybody's deep desire to know everybody else's secrets creates a very rich and fertile field for storytelling.
PR: - Having turned your hand to directing, how do your experiences as an actress influence your approach to directing and storytelling more broadly?
KS: - My experience as an actor has completely shaped my experience as a director. I find that the storytelling I like as a director is very emotional, character-driven and actor-friendly. I like to be in the faces of my actors, and I like to give them some space to experience an emotion from beginning to end. And it's the only way I know how to talk to my director of photography. I say things like, "Well, this is when the character feels the most claustrophobic" or "I need you to feel the sweat coming out of her pores", as opposed to saying, "I need a tight frame with a long lens." It's a very emotional way of directing, but much of directing is dealing with actors, all of whom are very different. Having spent decades in acting class, I've worked with a lot of different types of actors, and so that experience helps me on set as well.
PR: - Unlike other types of stories, comedy and horror are trying to provoke a visceral reaction. So, when you tell the director of photography you want to see the character sweat, you're trying to create moments that will elicit that response. It's an aggressive form of filmmaking, but horror cinema can also be incredibly sensitive.
KS; It's true and it contains multitudes, like the movie we're talking about. If anything is one thing, then it's gonna fall flat. What makes things feel scary is the moment of safety the character felt before. And that comparison of the highs and the lows are the ride you want to take people on. And so, as a genre filmmaker, if I don't understand how to tell a romantic story, I'm not going to be able to tell a story about murder.
PR: The horror genre has roots in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula, and then there's the influence of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft. You have starred in Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher as well as Shirley Jackson's The Haunting Of Hill House. Outside of horror, filmmakers frequently look to literature for inspiration, so, we might say that cinema owes literature a great debt.
KS: Absolutely. As an artist, reading is such a huge part of that because it stretches the imagination. And your art can only be as deep as your imagination. You can get lost in a book, in a whole world or universe, and then you can spend the rest of your life trying to bring those images you saw in your head and felt in your heart to film, the stage or to any other medium. But literature is the root of it all, in my opinion.
PR: If we were to explore the way in which the literary developed the horror story on its own terms before entering into a collaboration with cinema, are there any patterns we could identify?
KS: The horror genre goes back to the beginning of storytelling. Our first human emotion can be one of fear. "Where is my mother? Where is food? What is light? I'm alone." And then the opposite of that is love and hope, which is, "Oh, there's my mother. I'm safe; I feel satisfied."
Even Greek tragedies like The Odyssey and The Iliad have an aspect of horror. The best way to examine the human condition in a short form is to have extremely high stakes. Frankenstein is a story about the act of creation, desire and vanity, and that then becomes the substance — the idea that we examine the same flaws in ourselves over and over again, because we want to understand more about what it means to be human. And these stories, including The Life Of Chuck, ideally, take us one step closer to understanding what it is to be human.
PR: What struck me about The Life Of Chuck was how wordy it is. There's a playfulness in the dialogue exchanges between the characters that are full of detail, so much so that lines here and there might slip by you. It's not possible to discuss the film without discussing the script.
KS: It's also interesting because my six-year-old daughter came with me to the première. I had a whole setup where she could sit in a green room in the back with her iPad and some snacks and draw when she got bored. I do not think my six-year-old was understanding these conversations; I don't think she was in tune with the depth of dialogue. But I'll tell you, she was riveted, and she watched the whole thing. And I think there's a lesson there.
They say the mark of a great movie is if you watch it on mute, it still has the same emotional resonance. I think what makes the wordiness of The Life Of Chuck work, is that you feel the emotional resonance in the characters' chemistry, and the dialogue only elevates that. And that's why it can be wordy but not feel overly verbose.
PR: The Life Of Chuck is wonderfully strange and yet it's grounded in the unpredictable chaos of the present day.
KS: Yes, I think this movie is coming at exactly the right time, which is funny, because every iteration of this movie felt like it was at exactly the right time. When the short story showed up in If It Bleeds, when we were shooting it, the first edit, when it was at TIFF, and now in 2025. Each version of the world met Chuck at the right time.
PR: Is it a coincidence because it has been said there's no such thing?
KS: It's a harmony for sure.
The Life Of Chuck initially had a limited theatrical release on June 6th, followed by a wider release on 13 June, courtesy of Neon.
