When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he famously used the new device to make a simple phone call: a summons to his assistant, in the next room over. Imagine what he’d think of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone. In the new film, telephone technology takes the next great leap — communicating with those beyond the grave. We’ve got a first look at the Stephen King adaptation below.
In Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, Jaeden Martell (Metal Lords, The Book of Henry) plays Craig, a young man who befriends a reclusive billionaire named Mr. Harrigan (played by Donald Sutherland, of Ordinary People and The Hunger Games fame). Tragically, Mr. Harrigan is not long for this world. (That’s not a spoiler, we promise.) When the old man passes away, Craig soon finds he’s able to communicate with his deceased friend, via Mr. Harrigan’s titular phone. What happens next has to be seen to be believed.
For director and writer John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side), adapting Stephen King’s 2020 novella was a unique challenge. “Because it’s a novella and it’s only 80-something pages, [you have] to jump in and grab onto thematically what I think he’s trying to say and activate some of it into scenes that aren’t necessarily all in the novella,” Hancock tells Tudum.
Of course, it wasn’t all excitement and expansion. There was a healthy dose of anxiety involved in working with one of the most famous authors in the world. “You finish a script and you realize you’ve got to send it to Stephen, and you’re going to get a thumbs up or a thumbs down,” Hancock recalls. “You go, ‘Oh my God, Stephen King’s reading my script. I hope he likes it.’”
And once the film entered production, the crew ran into a few other challenges: namely, the hazards of making a mid-2000s period piece. In order to get ahold of enough period-appropriate technology, Hancock turned to his assistant, Jack Kramer. “He was a real tech whiz growing up. And he was one of those guys that would jailbreak phones and sell them on eBay,” Hancock says. “And he actually is from Connecticut where we shot. He had it all at his house there, which was only like 45 minutes away. And so prop said, ‘Do you have any?’ And he goes, ‘I got boxes of it.’”
But Hancock is adamant that the film is about more than just those old iPhones. “More than anything, it’s about an odd relationship between a billionaire in his 80s and a [young man] and the bonds of friendship, and how far will you go for a friend?” he says. It’s also not the horror story you might expect. “Do you like Shawshank Redemption, do you like Stand By Me, do you like Green Mile, do you like a ton of other Stephen King?” Hancock asks (rhetorically, of course). “My take on it was, it’s in the fashion of Brothers Grimm. It’s a cautionary fairy tale in a way.” So don’t worry, fraidy-cats: Halloween this is not. (Non-fraidy-cats, also don’t worry; Hancock still promises some “good scares.”)
Produced by Ryan Murphy, Jason Blum and Carla Hacken, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone hits Netflix on Oct. 5. This call is definitely coming from inside the house.
Additional reporting by Anne Cohen.
