A deadly plane crash, a conch, and barbaric savagery. That’s right, Lord of the Flies is back — and getting its very first television adaptation.
Based on William Golding’s dystopian classic and adapted for television by Jack Thorne (His Dark Materials, Help, Enola Holmes) , the four-episode series, which lands on Netflix May 4, follows a group of English schoolboys who become desert island castaways. Left to their own devices, the children attempt to handle the terrifying situation with civility, until tribes form and a violent power struggle emerges.
Get a sneak peek of the cast below, who make up the camp’s “big ’uns” and “little ’uns,” and check out the trailer above.
Starring David McKenna (Piggy), Winston Sawyers (Ralph), Lox Pratt (Jack), Ike Talbut (Simon), and Thomas Connor (Roger), the series is created and written by Emmy-winning co-creator of Adolescence, Thorne and directed by Marc Munden (The Mark of Cain, National Treasure, Help).
The timing of the adaptation, Thorne says, couldn’t be more pertinent. “As a society, we’re having a conversation right now about boys,” he says. “We’re losing a generation of boys, and we’re losing it because of the hate they are ingesting — because it is an answer to their loneliness and isolation.”
Upon rereading Golding’s book as an adult, Thorne was struck by the “tender portrait” of “very complicated boys having a complicated relationship with their status and anger.” The story, he says, is a distillation of our contemporary problem.
Filming took place in Malaysia, and the crew took full advantage of the country’s dense rainforests and uninhabited islands. They searched for natural locations that elicit an uneasy feeling and discovered the look of the film “organically,” Munden says. “We couldn’t shoot with the children after 6 o’clock, yet a lot of the action takes place after dark. Mark Wolf (director of photography) and I developed this idea of shooting day for night with an infrared camera, which responds to the green foliage, changing it to pink and red. It has a hallucinatory feel, heightened with magical realism.”
Many of the young actors make their onscreen debuts in the series, thanks to an open casting call put forth by multi-award-winning casting director Nina Gold (Game of Thrones, The Power of the Dog, Baby Reindeer).
McKenna nabbed the role of Piggy after submitting a tape in which he revealed with whom he’d most want to be stuck on a desert island. “I said I would want to be stranded with the West End cast of Les Mis, because, you know, who else?”
The actor, who made “lifelong friends” while working on the film, credits Munden for teaching him about performing — or rather not performing — for the camera. “He would explain to me how it needs to be a little more natural … rather than when you’re onstage, where it’s very dramatic and exaggerated,” McKenna says.
As Thorne puts it, the director, Munden, has the “ability to disappear” while shooting by not making the camera the focus. “There are scenes of kids playing with crabs, sand, or with creepers in the water, where it has an almost documentary feel of just watching kids and how they would be on an island.”
It was an education of sorts for the more than 30 boys who found themselves adventuring through a foreign land and acting in front of a camera for the first time.
“They learned that they didn’t have to present a character and say the lines like you might in a school play, that the character [would come] out of what they were doing,” Munden says. “They watched each other act, learning from one another, and everyone tended toward a higher level of performance as a result of that.”
The series, which will be split into four parts, offers viewers the chance to reexamine Golding’s writing in a new and urgent light.
“I hope it takes people back to the book, and I hope it allows people to lean into what the book really is, in my opinion — a difficult and dangerous account of who we are and what we’re capable of,” Thorne says.
Lord of the Flies arrives on Netflix in the United States on May 4.
