The Stand: Odessa Young Says She Feels “Lucky” in Updating Frannie

In CBS All Access’s limited series adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, Odessa Young plays Frannie Goldsmith, one of the immune survivors of the Captain Trips super-flu pandemic that wipes out 99 percent of the population. In King’s original novel, Frannie is one of the only main characters in Mother Abagail’s Boulder Free Zone that doesn’t get her chance to take a stand against evil as represented by Randall Flagg, but the series is set to change that with King having written the final episode, offering a “coda” to the story. It’s something King’s previously said he’d wanted to do for decades and now, Young says she feels lucky that she gets to be part of updating the iconic character.

“I feel extremely lucky!” Young told Marie Claire Australia. “At the time that we were shooting, it didn’t actually hit me that that’s what was going on. Then, the more I started to think about it I kind of realized that there’s something that is so beautiful about The Stand as a piece of work in general and that it has been a living, breathing organism since it was first published in the seventies.”

She continued, “King has updated it since then in the nineties, and then there was a mini-series which gave it a new life. So I just loved the porousness that this was. I love how King, as an author and a storyteller, can respond to the people who are digesting his work and keep it active. It means that the story is bigger than anybody can ever really put their fingers on. And so being a part of that, to be tasked with a really kind of colossal undertaking of being Frannie in this new iteration in which King has such a pretty heavy influence on, to the point that he wrote it—it feels pretty phenomenal.”

While it’s not yet clear exactly how Frannie will get to make her stand, series executive producer Benjamin Cavell has previously teased that it will be completely new to the audience.

“He wrote a coda that is our ninth episode. It will be completely new to the entire audience,” Cavell said previously. “I can, and will say, the big reason he wanted to do the coda was, he was thinking about for [the past] 30 years that Frannie doesn’t go on ‘the stand’ in the book. She’s seven or eight months pregnant, and can’t walk across the mountains to face the Dark Man. It always ate at him that she was one of the heroes of the book, and she was never given her ‘stand.’ The coda is his planned attempt for the last 30-years to give her her ‘stand.’”

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