[Greetings, loyal King Beat readers! In the wake of the TIFF world premiere of Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck, this week’s column is taking a different form than normal, but I hope you nonetheless enjoy.]
When people acknowledge that writer/director Mike Flanagan’s The Life Of Chuck is an atypical Stephen King movie, that’s a nod to the fact that it’s not a horror film, but it’s primarily a comment pointed at its second act. After all, the first finds a collection of characters experiencing the end of the world, and the third introduces elements of the supernatural to the story. Act II, titled “Buskers Forever,” is different. The titular Chuck, Tom Hiddleston’s Charles Krantz, is an accountant who finds himself swept up in the beat of a busking drummer (Taylor Gordon a.k.a. The Pocket Queen) and revives his long dormant dancing skills with Janice Halliday, a young stranger played by Annalise Basso.
Together, the three have a special, life-affirming moment that will stay with each of them forever. There are no blood-splattered prom queens, rabid dogs, or killer clowns (though, to be fair, there is a cameo from a cherry red 1958 Plymouth Fury). It’s just effervescent bliss evoked from passion.
It’s humanist fiction from Stephen King that Mike Flanagan translates practically word-for-word to the big screen, and anyone will be able to find beauty in it. But it holds special significance for Basso. It’s a story that she credits for not just stopping her from quitting the business, but for changing the way that she looks at her career.
Channeling My Own Inner Chuck
I personally related to Charles Krantz this past Saturday when I walked a mile to a small local tea shop – a designated meet up spot for an interview with Annalise Basso. In The Life Of Chuck, Tom Hiddleston wears a suit as he strolls through a crisp, clear day, and I wore a black polo and dark jeans with a chill and light rain in the air, but sartorial and weather conditions aside, the character is an accountant who is away from home on a business trip, and it was my third day in Toronto covering the Toronto International Film Festival.
I had seen Mike Flanagan’s new Stephen King adaptation earlier in the day, and while I am typically anxious and diligent about my interview preparation, fearful of an extended awkward pause and/or babbling symptomatic of a mind gone blank, I opted to lean on my experience as an entertainment reporter and genuine curiosity. My anxiety peaked when I arrived at the tea shop a few minutes before our designated meet up time and in the midst of a big rush of new customers.
Concerned about both space and crowd volume, I texted Annalise Basso’s publicist about a last minute location change to a bench outside next door (the weather was quickly getting nicer at that point), but I learned we had actually crossed paths, and she was already inside. I returned to the tea shop, which was surprisingly much calmer after just 10 minutes, and I saw the redheaded actress in a colorful blouse excitedly waving me over from a table at the front of the back room.
Chuck danced with Janice; I interviewed Annalise.
Becoming Part Of The Mike Flanagan Family
Though she is only 25, Annalise Basso’s history with Mike Flanagan goes back over a decade. In the summer of 2012, she was with her family in Ohio while her brother, actor Gabriel Basso, was in production on the Jordan Vogt-Roberts film The Kings Of Summer, and she was encouraged to send in an audition tape for an up-and-coming filmmaker who was developing his second feature: a horror movie about a haunted mirror titled Oculus.
“I’ve spent so much of the rest of my career trying to recreate the magic that happened in that tape,” Basso said with a smile. “And Mike – I think he would attest to the fact that he would've spliced it into the movie if he could.”
It was intense material. Those who have seen Oculus will surely remember the scene where Kaylie (played by Basso) and her younger brother Tim (Garrett Ryan) confront their mother (Katee Sackhoff), who is under the influence of the evil Lasser Glass. Ironically/fittingly (dealer’s choice!), the actress credits her own mother for the quality of the audition, as she assisted with the direction and staging. It was the start of a trend of gratitude in our conversation.
Also counting The Life Of Chuck’s Karen Gillan and Kate Siegel as part of its ensemble cast, Oculus was shot in the fall of 2012 in Alabama (the same state where the new Stephen King adaptation of filmed). It didn’t get released until spring 2014, but it was the first Mike Flanagan film to get theatrical distribution, and it launched his career in earnest. Per Basso, they never lost touch.
“I've loved working with him ever since,” Basso said. “He's unlike anyone else. He sets himself apart with his kindness and his clear vision.”
Anyone who is familiar with Flanagan’s filmography knows that he has a long history of fruitful and multi-project collaborations with actors, and Basso officially became a part of that tradition in 2015 when the filmmaker approached her for the role of Paulina Zander in Ouija: Origin Of Evil. He explained to her that Universal Pictures was going to insist on an audition, but that didn’t prove to be much of a hurdle. She was part of the Mike Flanagan family, and that’s her word, not mine. Speaking to the relationships on set, including her younger co-star Lulu Wilson, Basso said,
Mike has this ability to cultivate family. Lulu's mom became like a second mom to me. Lulu became like a little sister. For all the darkness that he creates, he attracts so much love.
O Discordia!
Acting since the age of nine, Annalise Basso’s first professional feature role was five years prior to Oculus in the 2007 movie Ghost Image, her other credits including shows like True Blood, Parks and Recreation and New Girl, and since the release of Ouija: Origin Of Evil, she has worked consistently, starring in 2018 horror film Slender Man with Joey King and playing LJ Folger in the first three seasons of the TNT television series Snowpiercer.
During the latter period, Basso says that she and Mike Flanagan lost touch, and when they did finally reunite, she admitted to being in a very different place mentally. She was living in New York at the time, but she met with the filmmaker last year in Los Angeles. While Flanagan is arguably at the peak of his career, well-known and regarded for movies like Doctor Sleep and series like The Haunting Of Hill House, his Oculus / Ouija: Origin of Evil star was feeling lost in a tough industry endlessly rife with rejection:
I was like, 'Mike, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where I'm going in my career. I think I might quit.’ I just was feeling some creative fatigue. I mean, I think every artist can relate to giving so much of yourself and being constantly rejected.
After spending more than half of her life as a professional actor, she also found herself taking a hard look at her own motivations. Instead of seeing her work as an art, she told me that she sees it as, “something that [she] did.” It was demotivating for her as she considered her career, and it was compounded by a feeling that she didn’t express enough gratitude for both the industry as a whole and the people who had supported her.
It was thinking about those important people in her life that led to her meeting with Mike Flanagan during her aforementioned trip to Los Angeles. She told him she was considering moving on from acting, but he halted that thinking. Basso told me,
He's like, ‘Before you quit, I have a role for you.’
"It's My Happy Place"
Janice Halliday is having quite the shitty day when we meet her in The Life Of Chuck. Not only does the guy she is seeing break up with her, he opts to do it via text message. She is in a rage and growling obscenities as she walks home from work… but then she sees a bespectacled man in the plaza drawing a crowd as he steps, sways and moonwalks to the beat of an enthusiastic drummer. As she watches, Janice herself can’t help but lose herself in a music, and as bopping to the beat escalates to a twirl, she catches Chuck’s eye, and he brings her into the impromptu performance.
It’s not difficult to draw some emotional parallels between Annalise Basso and Janice Halliday. But there was an important question to which Mike Flanagan needed an answer before he could offer her the part.
"He actually started the whole conversation with, ‘Do you dance?’” Basso recalled. “And I was like, ‘Mike, it's my happy place. It's where I find the most joy.’"
Basso says that she has always been dancing – with a passion for ballet as well as hip hop, salsa and flamenco – and she expressed a deep love for all of the teachers in her life. Now living in Los Angeles, she has further committed as an actor by enrolling in Stuart Rogers Studios, and she has been “surrounded by good teachers,” including her parents and dance instructors.
“My ballet teacher, she knew I wasn't gonna be a professional dancer either, but she saw and shared my love for ballet,” said Basso. “And I still dance with her in the laundry room of her apartment building. When people have a shared love of something, it's special. And that's exactly what happens in the movie.”
Mike Flanagan planned principal photography for The Life Of Chuck in the fall of 2023, having gotten permission from SAG-AFTRA as an independent production to shoot during the then-on-going strike, and the schedule perfectly aligned with Basso’s. She moved to Los Angeles and spent the whole summer dancing.
I had the privilege of working with Mandy Moore and her assistant choreographer, Jonathan Redavid… Speaking to the heart of this movie, the joy of life but also the joy of dance, Mandy loves dance, and so that we instantly clicked on that level. And Jonathan too just has a joy about him. Jonathan is Chuck. Honestly. Jonathan is Chuck. If Chuck were allowed to dance or if Chuck had chosen dance, Jonathan just encapsulates that joy.
As for the on-screen Chuck, Annalise Basso noted that a commonality that she shares with co-star Tom Hiddleston is that neither of them are professional dancers; they both just have a deep passion for dance. We also concurred that one would be hard pressed to find a more personable or genuine person in the industry, which is made all the more incredible given his level of fame.
Tom in between dance sequences, dancing for 14 hours a day, would introduce himself to the background [actors] and be like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. What's your name? Thank you so much for being here.’ And the grace that poured out of him was just incredible to watch.
Personal dance training for Basso was followed by rehearsal time in London with Tom Hiddleston, which she credits as something that they did out of wanting “the best for the moment.” After months of practice, the time came for the actors to deliver in front of the cameras.
The Magic Shot In The Life Of Chuck
Shooting the big dance sequence for The Life Of Chuck had challenges beyond the physical performances of the actors. One headache was simple cloud cover: a complication for continuity. Traditionally, such a scene would be shot in segments, but Annalise Basso and Tom Hiddleston “secretly knew” and prepared for Mike Flanagan capturing the choreography in full.
They were right, and it led to what Basso describes as “magic.”
There was actually this one shot, the last shot of the dance sequence, and Mike said that he had, I think, four other shots lined up. But after this one, he stopped because the last take of this shot was perfect. And it's the one that you see most often in the movie… I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it. Mike walked out with the biggest smile on his face, and Tom and I both had this mutual acknowledgement that this was it. And Taylor too, because we were a trinity in that moment, creating something incredible. There was a mutual understanding between all of us that this was the take.
Extensive ballet training taught her that the experience wasn’t going to be kind to her feet… but knowledge didn’t stop pain and damage. “At lunchtime I was soaking my feet in ice because I had been losing toenails, and the blisters on blisters on blisters…”
Mandy Moore, an Emmy Award-winning choreographer whose credits include La La Land and Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, told her that she had “dancer feet” – and that acknowledgement meant the world to Basso. With tears in her eyes and getting choked up, she told me,
That gave me so much pride, even as I was shedding tears of pain… It was one of those moments that just got flipped on its head in an instant because someone you respect, someone said, ‘I see you. I see the work that you're doing, and you're a dancer.’
Meeting Stephen King
With The Life Of Chuck strictly structured as it is, Annalise Basso wasn’t privy to the full scale of the film, and she didn’t actually reunite with her Oculus co-star Karen Gillan until the TIFF world premiere the night before our interview (Gillan plays one of the main characters in the first act of the movie, which is actually Act III in the nonlinear construction). The event also gave her the opportunity to meet Stephen King for the first time, and it once again gave her another chance to express gratitude. Said Basso,
I shook the man’s hand. I wish I had gotten a picture. I always forget to document these moments, but I’m trying to do the thing of putting the phone away… You just remember where you were taking the photo instead of remembering the moment, the actual experience. And so I just wanted that unfiltered, just shaking someone's hand and saying, ‘Thank you.’ And I got it. It was very satisfying.
Following the Toronto International Film Festival world premiere of The Life Of Chuck, Stephen King fans everywhere are waiting for news about distribution plans. Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for the latest updates about the wonderful new film, and head back here to the site next Thursday and every Thursday for a new edition of King Beat.
