Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels — a series of nine books that merges the worlds of dark fantasy, horror and Western — has found its way to the big screen in Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower. Idris Elba is Roland Deschain, a gunslinger out to protect the Dark Tower, a structure both physical and metaphorical. Matthew McConaughey plays his nemesis, Walter O’ Dim or the Man in Black. A chat with Oscar-winner MM on what drew him to the film, and his favourite Stephen King reads.

What excited you most about making The Dark Tower?

I have been doing a lot of very earthy dramas and I was ready to do something rather fantastic. I had a few offers from franchises that were already out there but they were all the second or third in line of the franchise. And without wanting to name them — even though I had seen them, liked them and enjoyed them — I felt I was being offered characters that were an amendment to a successful franchise. So I held out and The Dark Tower came along, and I thought it was original. And I liked the idea that I could get in on a film that could be a franchise, and get in on the ground floor, where I could create a character and be his author, and be the first one in the series, providing we make more than one. I hope that’s what happens.

I was also a fan of [director] Nikolaj Arcel and his last film

[A Royal Affair] was excellent. Ordinarily, that is subject matter that would bore me to tears but it was amusing, funny and well told. And then hearing about how grounded Nikolaj wanted to make The Dark Tower while also enthusing it with the extraordinary, I just thought, ‘I’m in’.

You haven’t really done much otherworldly work…

Yeah, if you look at the history of my work I have never really done anything like this. The most otherworldly thing would be Interstellar but that is still a different genre from this. So I was looking to go play, and to have some otherworldly fun. And then when I read the character of the Man in Black, well he might not literally be the Devil but he’s not too far away and there is no one more fun, who you could play versions of, than the Devil himself.

Most bad guys don’t think that they’re bad guys. Is that how you played Walter/Man in Black?

Right. And as evil as Walter is, I never took him on as someone who believes he is a bad guy. I took him on as a guy who thinks he is a minister of enlightenment, and he thinks he is speeding up the process of the inevitable. And he is calling out all the hypocrisy that’s shown by the human race along the way. He has one capable adversary and that is Roland/the Gunslinger [Idris Elba].

It is a wonderfully complex relationship he has with Roland…

Absolutely. In one way, Walter has had the Gunslinger walking in circles for centuries, like a hamster in a wheel. And then in another way, he wants to have the great meeting of good versus evil, the showdown. He wants something to go down. He wants to have his cake and eat it. The one downfall of the Man in Black is his perfectionism.

Sounds like you had a lot of fun with the role?

Oh yeah. And Stephen King gave me a lot with the books. The script and what was there gave a great grounding but then it was a case of, ‘Okay, let’s go for the imagination’.

Did you speak to Stephen King at all because he was closely involved?

He was not around day-to-day but we did exchange a brief email. He never tried to get in my eye-line or in my ear. And after speaking to him once, I felt confident from looking at his source material that I had a pretty good handle on the character that he created.

This is not a straight adaptation… it’s more of a continuation, or an amalgamation, is that right?

It is an amalgamation of different pieces from many of the books. It is set up to allow for a number of different follow-up stories, it’s not a 100 per cent direct pull from the first Dark Tower book.

What would you identify as the film’s genre?

I definitely don’t just see it as a full-on fantasy, or indeed a Western; I see it more as a story of good versus evil set in multiple universes! It is also an action-adventure. It is fantastic. It blends the otherworldly and the extraordinary. That’s the line with the story that Stephen originally created and that Nikolaj wanted to follow up on. It is an otherworldly adventure.

Does it contain some horror elements? This is Stephen King after all…

Yes! Yes, I think that’s fair. It definitely has some horror elements, and hopefully it triggers a lot of the DNA that is the source of our nightmares, absolutely, like what’s real and what’s not real. Who is the bogeyman under the bed? It touches on all those things, and what’s in our subconscious.

The story unfolds in our world and the Mid-World. How is the Mid-World different from our own?

I think I might give too much away if I talk about that. I would rather that be seen on the screen. But what I will say is that Walter and a few others have the ability to travel, quite quickly, between these multiple worlds, via portals. Each world can follow up on the other one simultaneously.

What are some of the secrets to playing a larger-than-life character like Walter? You don’t want to be too arch…

My choice, personally, is to stretch into the ‘arch’ and then come back. I like to imagine him as almost like an anime character, something unbelievable and not of this world. And then I come back from that. A lot of the fun is reaching past what we could consider human, or grounded. I find that a lot of fun and very creative. I play a sorcerer and a shape-shifter, and he can move to different places in time, and can move objects. He can really screw with people’s minds, with words or touch. He has got some badass powers, and to play with those is a lot of fun. There are many ways to be evil, to kill people and torture them. It can be quick, mass destruction, or other times it might be a slow burn. Sometimes, he might expose someone’s hypocrisy and they’ll self-destruct. There are many fun ways in which the Man in Black delivers his particular type of evil. And, like I said, he believes he is a minister of enlightenment.

Is he invariably the cleverest guy in the room?

Absolutely. And what are the biggest failings of being the cleverest guy in the room? Boredom and perfectionism. And if you are the cleverest guy in the room, who’s out there to challenge you and spark your fire? Walter has just one person who can spark his fire, and that’s his great adversary, Roland.

Roland is called the Gunslinger, but really his ethos is like that of a noble knight from medieval legend…. He has this creed, and it comes from a long line of people with the same creed. He is the last one left. Most of the world believes that the gunslingers were gone a long time ago, that they’re an old fable or fairy tale. But he is the last one. So, he’s everyone’s last chance.

Stephen King is someone whose stories almost everyone has come across, if not on the page then certainly on screen. Do you have any particular favourites?

I love James Caan and Kathy Bates in Misery. That one always stuck in my mind. And I have also had tremendous pleasure watching [Kubrick’s version of] The Shining as well. I was never a big reader and I didn’t follow King’s work like a fan would. But those films were great. I did check out all The Dark Tower books, and there’s a lot to read. It was fun, and it was different from what I normally would read. It was a good investment of time.

Were there any other sources you looked to when putting together your character and performance?

There was the character [Alex DeLarge] played by Malcolm Mcdowell in A Clockwork Orange. There was a whimsy and a joy with which he enjoyed the chaos and the anarchy. Walter is perhaps not as playful, and is more straight evil.