While The Stand may be stalled at the moment, another long-developing Stephen King adaptation is finally getting off the ground. After years of stops and starts, The Dark Tower is moving forward at Sony and Media Rights Capital with A Royal Affair filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel directing, and now the movie has found its female lead. Per Deadline, Abbey Lee is in talks to play the role of Tirana in the film opposite Idris Elba, who is set as gunslinger Roland Deschain. The cast also includes Matthew McConaughey as the villainous Man in Black, so Lee joins an already esteemed ensemble.
If you don’t know her from her modeling career, the actress is probably familiar as The Dag in Mad Max: Fury Road, one of the wives at the center of the film’s propulsive storyline. Planned as the first in a series of movies, The Dark Tower will draw mainly from the first book in King’s book series, The Gunslinger, which takes place in a parallel universe and revolves around Elba’s Roland Deschain trying to track down his ultimate adversary, The Man in Black, across a Western-esque landscape.
I’ve not read King’s book series, but as far as I can tell, no character named Tirana exists. I have a hard time believing they’d simply create a character for such a high-profile adaptation, but I suppose it’s possible. Either that or they renamed a main female character from the books. Hopefully someone more familiar with the material can weigh in in the comments, but I am happy to see this massive project finally getting off the ground.
Ron Howard, who was initially attached to direct, is producing The Dark Tower alongside Brian Grazer and Erica Huggins, with MRC also developing a TV series component. Originally, the plan was to create a trilogy of films with one TV season in between each, to allow them to tell the full story. It’s unclear if that’s still the plan, but neither Elba nor McConaughey are strangers to the TV world, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Dark Tower fans, sound off in the comments below with your thoughts/answers on this casting and the character of “Tirana.”
