McVries has a lean physique, ripped arms, and an indefatigable presence, but the actor’s preparation for the role went beyond making sure he didn’t skip leg day. “Francis told me to read some William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience,” Jonsson says. “That really reminded me of their relationship, this kind of yin and yang of who we are to be human. What McVries lacks, Garrity has. What Garrity has, McVries lacks.”
Together, they might be unstoppable. But only one can win.
The Long Walk itself was all too often halted in its tracks over the years, both as a book and as an attempted movie. It was the first of five finished novels to be stashed in King’s desk, unwanted and largely unread, until he finally hit the jackpot with his first published book, Carrie, in 1974. “I was trying to impress a girl that I met, and I gave it to her chapter by chapter,” King says of The Long Walk. “She liked it, and that was cool.” But she didn’t fall for the book hard enough to swoon for him too. “I don’t think that I ever managed to get lucky, but I certainly tried,” he says.
He then submitted the book to a Random House contest for aspiring first-time novelists, hosted annually by the legendary editor Bennett Cerf—known for shepherding the works of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Dr. Seuss, among many others. “Wow, that takes me back,” King says. “But I was depressed to get a form letter back, and I just never sent it anywhere else. Just put it in a drawer.”
Several years after following Carrie with bestsellers like ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, and The Stand, King considered resurrecting some of his better unpublished books. But his editors in those days worried that King was already too prolific. “Nobody wanted to publish too many books [by one author] at one time because they felt that it would be a drag on the market and people would be overwhelmed,” he says.
So The Long Walk finally hit bookstores in 1979. But it was published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, which King would use for five books. He planned to release Misery as a sixth under the fake name when the ruse was uncovered by a bookstore clerk in 1985. The King revelation turned each of the Bachman books into bestsellers, and The Running Man and Thinner were later adapted into movies.
The Long Walk was repeatedly considered for the big screen, but each attempt fell apart. Night of the Living Dead’s George Romero gave it a try in the late ’80s; Frank Darabont, no stranger to King with his adaptations of The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist, began developing a version in the late 2000s. More recently in 2019, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark filmmaker André Øvredal was attached to direct. But each time, The Long Walk stumbled in the development process.
