Hulu's '11.22.63' is a blast to the past
HAMILTON, Ontario — The new Hulu series 11.22.63 is a blast to the past, and an old Canadian school acted as a time machine for cast and crew.
It may be 2015 outside, but inside, what stands for Jodie High is a landscape of poufy dresses and conservative haircuts. A March 1963 calendar hangs on the wall of the teachers' lounge, along with pamphlets about the boys' model club, Methodist Youth Choir, college fairs and one emblazoned with “BUY YOUR CLASS RING!” in big friendly letters.
Jake Epping (James Franco) has come back to the 1960s to save President Kennedy from assassination in the eight-episode miniseries, based on the Stephen King novel, which Hulu is releasing in weekly installments each Monday. (Episode 2 is available Feb. 22). But there has been a slight detour on the way to that fateful day in Dallas: The teacher has come to small-town Jodie, passing himself off as Jake Amberson, but he has also fallen for the charms of the attractive young librarian Sadie Dunhill (Sarah Gadon).
“What Jake goes through parallels what I do as an actor,” Franco says. “He’s playing a part in a lot of ways to everybody in the past, and the trick of it is he has a mission that he thinks he’s going to accomplish and then he starts making all these emotional ties to people, mainly with Sadie.”
On this day during filming the fourth episode, Principal Deke Simmons (Nick Searcy) is walking with Jake in the hallway and giving him some advice, since Jake has been getting closer to Sadie. “Discretion is the better part of valor, young man,” Deke says, giving Jake a business card for a place he can take her for a more private encounter.
Their love is already fully in bloom, though, especially after a night at the school dance where Jake and Sadie lindy-hopped their way into each other’s hearts.
“I think we pulled it off,” Franco says proudly of the scene in the third episode, and Gadon recalls how she had to learn the old-school footwork on a lunch break her first day of filming.
“It’s like: ‘Oh hi, I’m in the '60s. Oh hi, now I’m doing a 40-minute dance sequence with James Franco.' It was just crazy, a complete whirlwind,” Gadon says. “It was really like getting vacuumed into this world.”
Comedy comes when Jake slips up and lets his modern sensibilities slip into his retro existence around Sadie, Gadon adds. “Ultimately what she loves about Jake is that he marches to the beat of his own drum and she finds that refreshing in this town. Little does she know that he’s not just slightly left of center. He’s from another time.”
King says viewers will see an America that was a simpler and more beautiful time, but one that was stifling for women and blacks. Executive producer Bridget Carpenter says King calls it casual racism. “That was very moving, and one of many favorite things about the book is an unstinting eye.”
Adds King: “You see the action, you key on the story and everything, but there’s the stuff all around it — and I’m not just talking about the set direction, which is fabulous. You get a look at a society that maybe didn’t have all its (stuff) together.”