MUMBAI: Hollywood actor James Marsden’s latest series “The Stand” may be set in an apocalyptic backdrop, but he believes the show is a timeless story that has much more to it than a deadly virus wreaking havoc on the world.

Written and created by “The Fault in our Stars” director Josh Boone and “Homeland” scribe Ben Cavell, the series is based on celebrated author Stephen King’s 1978 novel of the same name.

It follows a story of a group of survivors whose lives intersect after a deadly virus, “Captain Trips”, damages the world’s population.

Read More

Adapting any piece of Stephen King‘s work is a feat. But adapting The Stand? That’s a challenge on a whole other level, and one that CBS All Access it taking on this winter. During a series of interviews that included Decider, series executive producers Benjamin Cavell and Taylor Elmore, and star James Marsden revealed what they have planned for this new miniseries.

Though The Stand is one of the longest books in King’s vast bibliography, Cavell and Elmore opted for a more concise adaptation. CBS All Access’ miniseries only contains nine episodes, the first of which bounces between multiple timelines. Creating this fast-paced first episode was all part of Cavell and Elmore’s plan for the series.

“Obviously having a non-linear narrative differentiates us from the original miniseries, which has the same linear narrative as the book. But also, when we were first sitting down to lay all this out, it felt to me that everyone’s seen Contagion and Outbreak. I love those movies. But did we want to make people sit through three episodes of the world dying before we got to the meat of our story?” Cavell explained. “Look, for me — and I know Taylor feels this way too — The Stand is not really a book about a pandemic. I mean, of course it is, or part of it is or it has a pandemic in it. But really the pandemic is the mechanism by which the world gets emptied out so that our heroes can walk to Mordor to cross a kind of dead world.”

Read More

James Marsden stars in the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Stand” as Stu, an everyman who’s caught in an apocalyptic pandemic.

Premiering Thursday, Dec. 17 on CBS All Access and based on King’s novel first published in 1978, “The Stand” follows a large cast of characters whose lives intersect after a deadly strain of flu wipes out most of the world’s population — leaving the survivors to fight and establish new social systems. It was previously adapted for a 1994 ABC miniseries starring Gary Sinise as Stu.

“I love that it isn’t just about survival,” Marsden, 47, tells The Post. “It becomes this existential and spiritual journey. What happens when we hit the reset button? Who do we become and what choices do we make? I like exploring all those themes.

Read More

The X-Men, Westworld and Enchanted star James Marsden, 47, takes on the fate of humanity as Stu Redman in The Stand (Dec. 17 on CBS All Access). The limited series, which also stars Whoopi Goldberg and Jovan Adepo, revisits Stephen King’s apocalyptic story of a world devastated by a plague that wipes out a huge percentage of the population, and then plunges survivors into a life-and-death struggle between good and evil.

Why a series about a plague during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The book is over 40 years old and it’s one of Stephen’s greatest hits. We had not planned for COVID this year. Once you get into the show, it becomes less about a pandemic and more about what happens to humanity afterwards.

Read More

Nov. 24 (UPI) — Universal Pictures is giving a glimpse of The Boss Baby: Family Business.

The studio released a trailer for the Boss Baby sequel Tuesday featuring the voices of Alec Baldwin, James Marsden and Amy Sedaris.

The preview opens with a now-adult Tim (Marsden) and Ted (Baldwin) having grown apart. The brothers reunite at Christmas and discover Tim’s daughter Tina (Sedaris) is a secret agent for BabyCorp.

Read More

It isn’t every day that an actor plays a watchmaker. In fact, American actor and singer James Marsden is used to playing roles in drama movies like The Notebook, adventure roles in the X-Men series, and even starring in the dark comedy, Dead to Me, currently on Netflix and in the sci-fi show Westworld, among dozens of others. However, in the recently released drama video, “Born of a Dream: A Man of the Future,” Marsden plays Florentine Ariosto Jones, the American founder of IWC Schaffhausen. Recently, in a one-on-one interview, Marsden, an IWC brand ambassador, shared his thoughts about playing this role and how time influences all he does.

The IWC film is the newest addition to the brand’s “Born of a Dream” series intended to highlight the lives of extraordinary people who followed their dreams in the face of adversity. F.A. Jones is a prime example. In the movie, Marsden portrays the young Jones (complete with scenes from the Civil War that he fought in) who pursues a dream of creating a global watch brand by marrying American industrial technology with Swiss craftsmanship. Marsden aptly captures the excitement and trepidation Jones experiences throughout the journey from Boston to Switzerland, and the establishment of the International Watch Company, IWC, Schaffhausen. The video can be viewed here.

“Normally, my involvement with IWC doesn’t include acting or film-making, so it was a cool opportunity to share with the world the story of F.A. Jones and the birth of IWC,” says Marsden. “As an actor, I only want to be involved if I feel there is a compelling story to be told and this one intrigued me. I have always been fascinated with watchmaking and the craftsmanship that goes into it and so this resonated with me. We all want to pursue our dreams and hope they come true. This tale of a man who had a vision and bet on himself when the odds were against him, and overcame plenty of obstacles, I like those themes. That’s the journey of life. You have to find your path and find your passion and have the courage and determination to go for it. So, for me to be able to lend my skills as an actor, it was a nice little marriage there.”

Read More

The Boss Baby is back and this time it’s a family affair. DreamWorks Animation has added Jeff Goldblum, James Marsden, Eva Longoria, Ariana Greenblatt, and Amy Sedaris to the voice cast of the upcoming Boss Baby sequel, which has officially been titled The Boss Baby: Family Business. Alec Baldwin is returning as Boss Baby Ted, with Jimmy Kimmel and Lisa Kudrow also reprising the roles of Ted’s parents.

Tom McGrath, who directed the 2017 installment, which earned more than $500 million worldwide and was nominated for an Oscar, is back to direct the sequel with producer Jeff Hermann.

The new chapter sees the Templeton brothers — Tim (Marsden) and his Boss Baby little bro Ted (Baldwin) — as adults now who have drifted away from each other. Tim is now a married dad and Ted is a hedge fund CEO. But a new boss baby with a cutting-edge approach and a can-do attitude is about to bring them together again and inspire a new family business.

Read More

James Marsden was in the only place he could be. Not in his acting career, which has been fruitfully darting this way and that for years—quite literally, sitting for a recent phone call in his car in the driveway of his Los Angeles home, the only spot where he gets decent cell reception. “If it sounds like I’m talking from a submarine, let me know and I’ll change positions,” he said sheepishly.

Marsden has, over nearly three decades in Hollywood, proven surprisingly amenable to change, recalibrating his hunky star profile to best fit each disparate role that has come his way. He and I were talking during the COVID shutdown because I, perhaps like many of you, recently noticed in my unending watching of things just how ubiquitous James Marsden seems to be. Especially, of late, on television. Marsden wrapped his two-season run as a hapless and later murderous robot cowboy on HBO’s massive sci-fi series Westworld in 2018; in the spring of 2020, he appeared in both the lauded FX on Hulu period series Mrs. America (as a smarmy politician and TV host who doesn’t do right by Cate Blanchett) and the Netflix sleeper hit Dead to Me, as the (spoiler alert!) twin brother of a man murdered by Christina Applegate in the season-one finale.

In the fall, Marsden will migrate to CBS All Access as part of the ensemble of a much-anticipated adaptation of Stephen King’s doorstopper 1978 novel The Stand. From science fiction to historical drama (with some satire), to contemporary dark comedy, to plague apocalypse is a pretty wide range to walk, yet Marsden has never seemed uncomfortable in building his curio cabinet of roles. He has become a true journeyman actor, one whose matinee-idol good looks can sometimes belie the thinking, shape-shifting performer behind them.

Read More

James Marsden is everywhere. He knows it too. “I get texts from people saying, ‘You are on my TV screen all the f**king time. How do you do this?’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry!’”

There’s truth to the ubiquity of his Hollywood existence. Since coming onto the scene in the early ’90s, Marsden, 46, has amassed an extensive resume of more than 75 credits (and counting), featuring roles so different from the others that it’s nearly impossible to put him in a box. If you’ve thought it, he’s probably done it. From playing the hot guy on The Nanny’s first episode to earning superhero cred as Cyclops in the X-Men franchise, to capturing hearts as the dreamy leading man in 27 Dresses, to dipping into the secretive world of Westworld as an innocent cowboy, Marsden has led a charmed career — a fact he’d be the first to acknowledge. (When you can check Disney prince off the proverbial bucket list, you’ve reached a different level.) More impressively, he hasn’t slowed down since.

When Marsden hops on the phone on a Tuesday afternoon in June, he opens with an apology for mixing up the interview times as his Oklahoma niceness peeks through. “I told my PR rep, ‘I’m an actor. I never said I was smart,’” he playfully jokes. Somehow, we doubt that to be true; after all, he’s been more than a little busy. By mid-March, right before a nationwide lockdown was ordered, Marsden wrapped three incredibly varied TV projects during a six-month span, hopping back and forth from Netflix’s dark comedy Dead to Me to FX on Hulu’s period piece Mrs. America, to CBS All Access’ upcoming Stephen King drama The Stand. Ask him how he pulled off triple duty and even he doesn’t know.

Read More