Ewan McGregor Is Haunted in Trailer for Stephen King's The Shining Sequel, Doctor Sleep
All work and no play makes Ewan McGregor a dull boy!
The actor stars in the upcoming film Doctor Sleep, which dropped its first trailer on Thursday and is based on author Stephen King‘s sequel to The Shining. McGregor, 48, plays a grown-up version of Danny Torrance in the movie.
Fans of The Shining will remember Danny as the young son of Jack Torrance, the character that Jack Nicholson made famous in the 1980 horror classic.
In the trailer, Danny is still grappling with the trauma he endured as a kid while living with his father at the Overlook Hotel. The character then meets a young girl who has “the shining” — the same psychic power that Danny learned he possessed as a kid.
“I’ve only met two or three people like us,” Danny tells the girl. “They died.”
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The trailer also features numerous callbacks to the 1980 film — including a shot of McGregor’s character looking through a door that his father once famously hacked through with an ax.
Other callbacks include a shot of the terrifying lady in the bathtub in one of the hotel’s rooms, and another look at the creepy identical female twins, both scenes made famous in The Shining.
It’s unclear whether Doctor Sleep will more closely align with the novel or the movie version of The Shining, which are somewhat different.
King wrote Doctor Sleep as a sequel to his novel, telling Entertainment Weekly in 2013, “One of the things — and I’m not sure if this is going to be a problem for readers or not — is that Doctor Sleep is a sequel to the novel. It’s not a sequel to the [Stanley] Kubrick film. At the end of the Kubrick film, the Overlook is still there. It just kind of freezes. But at the end of the book, it burns down.”
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The movie is directed by Mike Flanagan, whose previous thriller Gerald’s Game was also an adaptation of a King novel. Aside from McGregor, the movie also stars Rebecca Ferguson and Jacob Tremblay.
Doctor Sleep arrives in theaters this November.
