Ewan McGregor Talks About Channeling Jack Nicholson in DOCTOR SLEEP and a Promo Teases New Trailer Coming Soon

I don’t know about you, but I’m excited for director Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep, which serves as a sequel to The Shining.

We’ve got a new promo spot for you to watch today that teases a new trailer that is going to be dropping on Sunday and I’ll be looking forward to watching it!

The film continues the story of Danny Torrance 40 years after his terrifying stay at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. Torrance is played by Ewan McGregor, and in a recent interview with /Film, the actor opened up about the film and how he looked to Jack Nicholson’s portrayal as Jack Torrance for inspiration as he played Danny.

First he talked about his experience with Stanley Kubrick’s film saying:

“I watched the movie when I was 16 or 17, or something like that. I didn’t watch it when I was younger because I was born in ’71 and it was late ’80s. I remember it being talked about as the scariest film there’s ever been, so I didn’t watch it for years and years after it was made. Only into my late teens, or even maybe when I went to drama school in my twenties, I finally watched it. And I did find it really scary, because it’s a scary movie. It’s interesting watching it now and seeing how the music is almost — if you took the music away it wouldn’t be such a terrifying movie. It’s a very skilled piece of filmmaking. And then watching it now versus then with a completely different mindset, thinking about doing the sequel and thinking about how [it affects] our story and watching it for that. Because you know, it’s completely backstory, isn’t it, for my character. A good backstory. So it was quite interesting watching it for that reason.”

The actor was then asked if he studied the mannerisms of child actor Danny Lloyd, and that’s when he revealed that he instead studied Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance:

“No, I’m not really watching little Danny, I’m watching Jack, really. Because he’s my dad. I’m trying to get a sense of my father so much in the book. Doctor Sleep is obviously about my character’s history with my dad and the effect that it has on Danny, the effect of the Overlook Hotel on Danny. So I’m trying to figure out the world of the hotel, I suppose. And there’s not very much I can pick up from the kid in The Shining. I don’t know how much we resemble our 5-year-old selves when we’re adults, but we are similar to our fathers in many ways. So it was more interesting for me to look at Jack in that perspective.”

Don’t worry, he’s not looking to impersonate Nicholson:

“No, I’m not trying to copy Jack Nicholson, no. I’m trying to sound like his son, that’s all. I’m trying to sound vocally like his son, but that’s it really.”

McGregor went on to talk about Danny and where he finds himself in this story:

“For me, there are some very key things about Dan. One is he’s an alcoholic. When we find him at the beginning of the story, there’s a drinking problem. We see his rock bottom and we flash some time forward and he’s now sober. So that’s running through everything for me, it’s that. And the sort of exploration and thinking about that. And then he’s a son of his mother, his father, and he has a relationship to his past with them that’s very traumatic. He went through this huge traumatic experience where his father tried to hurt him…So there’s that experience with his parents. And thirdly, his Shining, his psychic abilities that have shown themselves in sort of the worst way in his past, and which he’s trying to forget. And indeed in our first scenes [with Kyleigh Curran] where we first meet, after having this psychic relationship, my advice to Abra is to ignore your Shine. Don’t do it, don’t go there. And she brings him out of himself and they go on this journey together. Those are the three things that I think about. […] There are very evocative moments. I had to wake up under an overpass after having been [in] some scenes in a bar where, in the book, he [hits] rock bottom in a situation with a character called Deeny. And that’s what Dan’s rock bottom is, his shame, the thing he can’t approach. And towards the end of the novel, he’s able to own up to it in front of a bunch of alcoholics at an AA meeting. After that event, he wakes up under an overpass, there’s a scene in a bus. It all sort of lends itself to that moment, it filled up that moment for me. I found that fun to play. Then the AA meeting, him getting sober, that’s a nice journey for a character in the space of a movie to not only go from here to here in a character arc. He sort goes to this and he jumps to this. His arcs are quite interesting to play, I like it.”

The character arc for Danny is certainly an interesting one, and it’s going to be very interesting to see how the character is handled in the movie. But Flanagan is a great filmmaker, and I trust that he and McGregor are going to deliver something great. This is the synopsis that was shared for the film:

Still irrevocably scarred by the trauma he endured as a child at the Overlook, Dan Torrance has fought to find some semblance of peace. But that peace is shattered when he encounters Abra, a courageous teenager with her own powerful extrasensory gift, known as the “shine.” Instinctively recognizing that Dan shares her power, Abra has sought him out, desperate for his help against the merciless Rose the Hat and her followers, The True Knot, who feed off the shine of innocents in their quest for immortality.

Forming an unlikely alliance, Dan and Abra engage in a brutal life-or-death battle with Rose. Abra’s innocence and fearless embrace of her shine compel Dan to call upon his own powers as never before—at once facing his fears and reawakening the ghosts of the past.

Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8, 2019.

The world will shine again. Final trailer coming Sunday. #DoctorSleepMovie pic.twitter.com/pxtAs7OWXo

— Doctor Sleep (@DoctorSleepFilm) September 5, 2019