Ewan McGregor has been cast as Danny Torrance in Mike Flanagan’s feature adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Doctor Sleep (2013), Variety reported. Doctor Sleep is the sequel to The Shining (1977), which was adapted into a feature film in 1980 by Stanley Kubrick.
The apple has not fallen far from the tree: in Doctor Sleep, Danny Torrance is a spiteful alcoholic like his father, the novelist Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in Kubrick’s movie.
Danny Torrance, whose telepathic powers called “the shining” came to the forefront in the first novel, has been able to suppress his talent in Doctor Sleep with alcohol. However, sobriety brings them back to the surface and he becomes attached to 12-year-old Abra Stone, a girl also gifted with telepathy and who is the target of a group of near-immortal evil beings.
Flanagan has been one of the hottest new directors in the horror genre with back-to-back critical and commercial successes, including Oculus (2013), Hush (2016), and the Stephen King adaptation Gerald’s Game (2017). Doctor Sleep is scheduled to be released on January 24, 2020.
