The Stand: New Featurette Introduces the Citizens of the Boulder Free Zone

CBS All Access has released “Meet The Citizens Of The Boulder Free Zone”, a short featurette for The Stand giving fans a closer look and better introduction at some of the characters making up Mother Abagail’s (Whoopi Goldberg) new society in Boulder, Colorado in the wake of the Captain Trips pandemic. The group of survivors in Boulder stand as the opposite of those gathering with Randall Flagg in Las Vegas. Specifically, the short video (which you can check out down below) focuses on Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo), Ray Brentner (Irene Bedard), Nick Andros (Henry Zaga), Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke), Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear), and Nadine Cross (Amber Heard).

In The Stand, Mother Abagail draws to her the people she has been led by God to believe are essential to setting up a new society and as the video shows, each of them comes from a different place in life before the pandemic and each has their own unique role to play as things go forward. We’ve already met some of the characters featured before — Larry Underwood’s origin was introduced in last week’s “Pocket Savior” and we’ve seen bits of Nadine, Ray, and Nick — but photos from this week’s upcoming “Blank Page” reveal that we’ll be getting a bit more of his and Nadine’s stories as well as officially meeting Glen Bateman, a character that Kinnear recently said is his “channeling” of The Stand novel author Stephen King.

“Well, I read this book when I was in high school. And it is a very, very, very, very, very long book. In fact, if you want to feel good about the pandemic you’re in, read Stephen King’s The Stand and it will give you a whole new perspective on pandemics because that kind of backdrop is the nuclear bomb of pandemics is what’s going on with this story,” Kinnear recently told ComicBook.com. “And ultimately, we focus on a set of characters that are left standing and challenged with the idea of rebuilding society and I think it’s ultimately a wrestling and a grappling of good versus evil for everyone.”

Kinnear continued, “And I loved Glen when I read the book. I think it’s kind of the voice of Stephen King, strangely enough. I’m channeling King. He kind of has a banjo plan, you know, a dime store philosophy quality to him, this guy. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about myself, as a writer, but I did like his take on everything. At top of the show, you find him having already given up on society, which in a way is kind of a power position. Everybody is grappling with what they’ve lost and here’s a guy who had kind of already checked out. And so, I think he’s more along for the ride, not trying to get back where we were, but just to kind of study it. It’s a sociology study for him and I think his eyes are open. And he’s learning as he goes and is enjoying the ride as best you can in all of this.”

The first two episodes of The Stand are now streaming on CBS All Access. New episodes arrive every Thursday.

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