Doctor Sleep Featurette Features First Look at New Danny Torrance

The upcoming Doctor Sleep serves as not only an adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name but also a continuation of 1980’s The Shining adaptation, with the above featurette revealing our first full look at the actor who plays Danny Torrance in flashback sequences, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly. In Doctor Sleep, Ewan McGregor plays the adult Danny, but with the trauma of his past shaping his entire future, the film will utilize newly-filmed sequences that explore previously unseen moments that took place at the horrifying Overlook Hotel. Check out the featurette above and see Doctor Sleep in theaters on November 8th.

“I always wondered what happened to Danny when he grew up,” King shares in the video about his inspiration for the novel. “And I felt that I had a story to tell.”

In The Shining, audiences witness a family tasked with caring for the Overlook in the off-season, only for a supernatural force to drive the family’s patriarch to madness. The “shining” mentioned in the title refers to Danny’s ability to read people’s thoughts, which will be more of a theme of the new film than the ghost stories audiences previously witnessed.

“Danny Torrance is still being haunted by the events that took place at the Overlook Hotel,” director Mike Flanagan pointed out. “‘The shining’ refers to psychic ability, the people who actually affect the physical world with their thoughts, read the minds of others. Danny is so traumatized by what he’s been through, he has no idea how to deal with this.”

Young Danny is played by Roger Dale Floyd, with Flanagan also having to recreate iconic sets from the original Stanley Kubrick film to tell this follow-up story.

“It’s interesting too because what you’ve seen today, in the more iconic imagery that’s been on the screen, that isn’t taken from the Kubrick film,” Flanagan confirmed with press earlier this year. “There’s only one shot in the trailer you saw that’s actually his footage, and that’s the shot of the bloody elevators.”

He added, “Everything else is us. Everything else is our recreation. So I don’t want to spoil to what extent and what specific, outside of what you already got to see, what we have kind of been able to revisit form Kubrick’s world. But I can say that everything that we decided to use, our intention was always to detail and reverence, and making sure that we were doing it properly, with the hope that even the most rabid cinephiles might not be able to tell the difference with some of our frames and some of his.”

Doctor Sleep hits theaters on November 8th.

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