Stephen King's FIRESTARTER - First Look at Ryan Kiera Armstrong as Charlie
The upcoming film adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter has found its Charlie, the young pyrokinetic girl at the center of the story. Charlie will be played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong (American Horror Story, The Tomorrow War) and above you will see a first look photo of her in the film. The role was originally played by Drew Barrymore in the 1984 adaptation.
The new movie is being helmed by Keith Thomas (The Vigil) from a script by Scott Teems (Halloween Kills). Armstrong joins Zac Efron who is playing her father Andy McGee and Michael Greyeyes (Fear The Walking Dead) will play the villainous Rainbird, “a relentless powerful man who has been pushed into a violent life.”
King’s original story follows Charlie McGee who develops pyrokinetic abilities and is abducted by a secret government agency called the Department of Scientific Intelligence, aka “The Shop.” They want to harness her powerful gift as a weapon.
Here’s the description of the story from the book:
Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson were once college students looking to make some extra cash, volunteering as test subjects for an experiment orchestrated by the clandestine government organization known as The Shop. But the outcome unlocked exceptional latent psychic talents for the two of them—manifesting in even more terrifying ways when they fell in love and had a child. Their daughter, Charlie, has been gifted with the most extraordinary and uncontrollable power ever seen—pyrokinesis, the ability to create fire with her mind. Now the merciless agents of The Shop are in hot pursuit to apprehend this unexpected genetic anomaly for their own diabolical ends by any means necessary…including violent actions that may well ignite the entire world around them as Charlie retaliates with a fury of her own….
I’m curious to see how this new adaptation of the story turns out. I’m a fan of the book and the original movie, so I hope this next adaptation ends up being good. In a previous interview, the director talked about his upcoming adaptation and explained how it will be different from the original film.
"It's something I've thought a lot about. And, certainly, when the project first came to me, I was very lucky in that the script by Scott Teems, who wrote the upcoming Halloween Kills, was just very, very good, and very rich. The material itself isn't different, right? I mean, it's the same book that this film is drawing from, the one the earlier film did. But what we're leaning into from the book is different. That's the angle where you can do something. So, for me, it was really leaning into more emotional aspects. It was leaning into parenthood and what that looks like, and then, how do you raise a child, especially a child with abilities like this. That was the place the script went and I thought that it was something that's a little different than the original film.
"Also, the book's super rich. There's a lot of stuff that's in the book that isn't in the original film. There's stuff in there that we're using, that we're going into. At the same time, I feel like, just for me, in terms of the films I'm interested in, I feel like there's a visceral quality to the story that I didn't see in the '80s version, a rawness that I think is there in the book, that I certainly felt, that I'm really interested in diving into. And, luckily, I think everybody else involved feels the same way, that this is going to be ... not only will it have the effects and you're going to get to see all the stuff Charlie can do, which is fun, and cool, and exciting, but if we do it right, it's not so much as dark as The Vigil, but you should come out of it emotional. If you do it right, it's going to really hit that way."
Source: Deadline
