After an exhaustive search presumably conducted across an endless desert and multiple alternate realties, Sony has found a kid to play Jake Chambers in its adaptation of Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga. That comes from Variety, which reports that the lucky young actor is relative newcomer Tom Taylor, a kid who only has a few roles to his name (two British TV shows and some appearances as a young version of Sean Bean’s character on TNT’s Legends). Taylor will be appearing alongside Idris Elba’s Roland Deschain and Matthew McConaughey’s Man In Black in the film, though he probably won’t interact much with the latter in this installment beyond a key meeting or two. Unless it deviates from the first book, of course.
As for who the Jake Chambers character is, he’s a mostly normal kid from “our” universe (or at least one similar to ours) who wakes up in Roland’s crazy, sci-fi/fantasy world after he gets hit by a car. Roland takes Jake with him on his quest to reach the mythical Dark Tower, and the kid becomes the gunslinger’s protege. But, at the end of the book, Jake falls into a…grand adventure full of good times. He also gets one of the best lines in the whole series, so Tom Taylor better be ready to nail it.
The first Dark Tower movie, if you’re willing to believe that it’ll actually get made this time, will be directed by Nikolaj Arcel and it’ll be in theaters on February 17, 2017.