The world has countless stories about falling in love, but Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story is one about staying in love, even after one member of a couple is gone forever.
In the Apple TV+ series debuting June 4, King starts at the end of a romance, exploring where devotion took Lisey and Scott Landon—what it cost them and what it gave them. King being King, he weaves a stalker thriller and an otherworldly supernatural mystery into his heartfelt love story.
The show, based on his 2006 novel, stars Julianne Moore as the widow of a world-famous author (Clive Owen), who over the course of his turbulent life discovered a passageway into a parallel dimension that helped him tap uncanny creative energies. His secret was only shared with her, although she struggled to understand it when he was alive. Now that Scott has passed away, there are outsiders willing to do anything to gain access to the unpublished materials he left behind, even if it means destroying the woman who meant everything to him.
“I wanted to say something about marriage, about long marriage, and about celebrity and about the side of lives that are public and the sides of lives that are private—and the door between those two worlds,” King told Vanity Fair.
King usually takes a hands-off approach to adaptations of his work, but he wanted to keep this one close. The author wrote the script for each of the show’s eight episodes himself, then went in search of a home for them. J.J. Abrams agreed to produce through Bad Robot Productions, assembling an A-list cast led by Children of Men costars Owen and Moore, with Moore also signing on as an executive producer. Abrams recruited filmmaker Pablo Larraín, best known for 2016’s Jackie, to bring a story set largely within the title character’s head onto the screen. “He directs in a kind of hypnotic, inside-out way,” Abrams said. “His approach lent itself well to a story that, at the core of it, is a very, dark and twisted adult fairy tale.”
Lisey’s Story is special to King in part because it’s inspired by his own 50-year marriage to novelist Tabitha King, a few actual brushes with death, and some terrifying, almost unbelievable, close encounters with real-life stalkers. It hardly gets more personal than that, even if his experiences aren’t the norm. He doesn’t call this story a valentine to his wife, but writing it was a way of saying he sees what she goes through. The series even includes a new sequence that’s drawn from an insult Tabitha weathered not long ago after making a donation to charity.
“One thing I wanted to say was that with a person who is famous, it can be so bright that they have a tendency to eclipse the people who stand the closest them,” King said. “But Tabby is responsible for so much of what I have done, and she’s been so supportive of me over the years. It isn’t a love letter to her, because that would be a little bit embarrassing for me, and it would be horribly embarrassing for her. But certainly everything that I know in all my experience in marriage has been positive. And that’s in there.”
“In that sense, it’s autobiographical, but only in the sense that you take what you know as a framework and then build something that’s totally fictional on that,” King added. “For one thing, I haven’t died yet, but I did come back from almost dying when I had pneumonia. And they told Tabby, ‘Prepare for the worst.’”
That was roughly 17 years ago. When King pulled through and was well enough to return home, he found that Tabitha had used his absence to begin the process of renovating his office. “What she said was, ‘Don’t go up there. You won’t like it,’” King recalled. “The place was totally empty, from one end to the other. The bookshelves were empty, and the desk was totally clear. There wasn’t even a laptop on it. I thought, Maybe I did die, and this is what I’ve come back to.” That got King thinking about what might happen after he really does die.
Rather than guiding viewers carefully through this surreal mythology, the show plunges them into the middle of its narrative and expects them to make their own sense of it, even as the characters do the same. “It’s the thing that Steve is, of course, famous for, which is creating great characters and putting them in situations that are abnormal and extreme and often horrific,” Abrams said. “I think that’s where this show lives.”
Lisey’s Story is about a woman with two rooms to unpack. One is the office full of boxes, papers, and unfinished business relating to her late husband. The other is inside her, packed with a lifetime of memories with a person who never felt he belonged in this world, but found a place in it with her.
Scott Landon created books. Lisey created their life. She grounded him in reality, and he showed her a passage to a mystical world where imagination sometimes crosses over into madness. In the wilds of this place, the plants and flowers are different, more vivid. The sky itself is alien. There’s a pool surrounded by shrouded figures, and its waters have the power to both heal and inspire. On its outskirts, predatory beasts roam like living nightmares.
“She realizes early in the marriage that this is a real place, because he takes her there,” King said. “She says to him, ‘We can never talk about this again, because I just can’t deal with it.’ So she’s put it all away, like in boxes. He understands that some day, in order to survive, she might have to open those boxes.” Before his death, Scott left something behind to help Lisey. “A treasure hunt, a scavenger hunt,” King said. “Little by little, she’s able to come back to what she’s hidden from herself.”
The true threat to Lisey comes from predatory beings in our own world. One of them is a university professor (Ron Cephas Jones) named Roger Dashmiel who wants to persuade her to entrust him with her husband’s library and unpublished papers. The other is a stalker he enlists to apply pressure on her. Dane DeHaan plays Jim Dooley, an obsessive fan. With his eyes at half-mast, and his voice a monotone, Dooley’s malignant intensity is evident to everyone who crosses his path—except for the erudite professor, who realizes too late what he has unleashed.
This is where the unhinged stalkers Stephen and Tabitha have dealt with in real life became part of the narrative. “I’ve had my share of crazies. There’s one guy who’s chasing me around from pillar to post. He’s convinced that I killed John Lennon,” King said. “He shows up in Bangor sometimes, and hands out his little leaflets about how there was a conspiracy between me and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon to kill Lennon because of his anti-war stance.”
Another stranger targeted his wife when Stephen and his son Owen were away at a basketball game. “This guy broke in. He was from Texas, and he was convinced that somehow I had stolen his aunt’s idea for Misery. Tabby heard the glass break and came down, and he was standing in the kitchen. He had a package and said, ‘This is a bomb,’” King recalled. “Well, the bomb turned out to be a lot of pencils and erasers and things that were wired together with bread ties. So those people are around. Maybe just on the basis of what I do, I’ve attracted a few.”
At her core, Lisey is a caregiver. She often guided Scott back from the precipice, and now she has a new family crisis that has nothing to do with her famous husband. One of her sisters, Darla (played by the ever-fiery Jennifer Jason Leigh), has that special sibling power to roust and antagonize Lisey when she feels she can’t go on. They have another sister, Amanda, played by an unrecognizably distressed Joan Allen, who is battling a crippling mental illness that has left her institutionalized and near catatonic.
As she fades away, Lisey begins to think about the rejuvenating properties of the other world Scott showed her. If she can evade the men threatening her, Lisey might be able to use what she learned from Scott to save someone else she dearly loves.
Fantasy does have the power to heal and fortify, but anyone who indulges it too long can also become lost. Keeping that in mind will guide viewers through Lisey’s Story.
“I don’t want to put anybody off. It’s not a simple story. It’s not a to b to c,” King said. “You hope that the audience will understand that there are secrets here—there are really big secrets—and hope they’ll stick with the show, find those things, and unravel them. I think everything becomes clear fairly soon.”
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