Details Behind The Horrific Baseball Boy Scene in Stephen King's DOCTOR SLEEP

There is a defining moment in director Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep that kicks the film into a whole new horrific gear. That scene involves the Baseball Boy, and if you haven‘t seen Doctor Sleep yet, you might not want to read any further.

The Baseball Boy scene is a brutal and emotional scene in the film in which Rose the Hat, and her group known as The True Knot, kidnap a young boy walking home from a baseball game so that they can feed on his shine, which they call steam.

You see, the steam tastes better when the person they are feeding off of is scared to death and is feeling pain. So, The True Knot ends up slowing and painfully torturing this poor innocent kid to death. It’s an insanely traumatic scene and while it didn’t show any visuals of the torture in the film, you can still heavily feel the emotion and cringing brutality of it. It’s a hard scene to watch!

The one thing that sells this scene is the incredible performance by Jacob Tremblay, who played the Baseball Boy a.k.a. Bradley Trevor. It turns out that shooting this scene was very hard to shoot for a lot of people on the set. The one person who walked away from it happy was Tremblay!

In a recent interview with CinemaBlend, Flanagan shared how he put the scene and the performance all in Temblay’s hands. They had no idea what kind of performance he was going to bring when he showed up on the set to shoot this scene. The end result shocked the hell out of everyone. Flanagan was insanely impressed and some of the actors couldn’t even keep their composure and were brought to tears. Flanagan says:

"My approach was to get out of Jacob's way. Having worked with him before, I know a little bit about what Jacob is capable of, but I'm always surprised, because I thought I knew what he could do, and then I saw Room, and was like, 'Oh my God. I didn't know him at all!' Jacob did that himself. He prepared that performance away from us, before he reported to set. He showed up and he said, 'I've got this. I know what I'm going to do. So, I'm okay.' And he kind of sweetly and quietly got into position.”

The position he’s talking about is being tied up on a dirt ground surrounded by the villainous True Knot who will devour his steam by carving him up. That’s when Tremblay kicked into gear and started begging and desperately screaming.

Mike Flanagan went on to explain that the adult actors performing the scene including Robert Longstreet, Emily Alyn Lind, Carel Struycken, and more “were left absolutely mortified by the experience, and Zahn McClarnon, who plays second-in-command Crow Daddy, lost his grip on his emotions.” While everyone around him was emotionally devastated, Tremblay had a big smile on his face when the scene ended:

“He just did it, and none of us knew how to react. The True Knot was traumatized, like Rebecca [Ferguson] and all these like big swaggery monsters were just destroyed. Zahn McClarnon had to leave. He was crying at the end of it. It was silent as a funeral when we called cut, and Jacob just hops up, high fives his dad – covered with blood, grinning ear to ear. His dad is smirking cause he knew what was gonna happen, and he knew what we were going to see, and he went off to craft service and got a snack.”

Rebecca Ferguson also admitted that she was overwhelmed with emotion during filming this scene. She talked about her own experience, saying:

“Someone had said to me previously, 'Are you...' because I have a 12 year old son 'will this affect you? Will you go into your headset that it's your child?' And I thought, 'No,' because I get paid to act, and that's what I do. I separate them. One is called reality, one is non. A little bit cocky. And then action happens, and [Jacob Tremblay] kicks into action, and I'm so mesmerized by the sound, the guttural wrenching kind of animal sounds, that I just freeze and tears are pouring down my face. I realized that I will ruin the scene because it's a two shot. So I am wiping tears, slapping myself and waiting for my cue of desperation.”

Shooting this scene sounds like it would have been quite an incredible experience. Tremblay gave such an awesome and disturbing performance that Flanagan didn’t think he would be able to put it in the final cut of the film!

“The rest of us had to soak in this horrible. And I looked at [producer] Trevor [Macy] at that point and was like, 'We're screwed. We can't show this.' And we only showed a small fraction of his performance, and it's too much!”

Tremblay is one hell of a talented young actor and even though he had a very small role in Doctor Sleep, he made a lasting impression. That’s the scene that everyone will be talking about!

Doctor Sleep is now in theaters and if you haven’t seen it yet, what are you waiting for?! It’s a great film!