16-year-old actor Tom Taylor is shy and quiet. He is chilling at his family home in Surrey with his cat when we talk. Meanwhile, across the internet excitement is building around the release of The Dark Tower. It’s the first instalment of a major TV and movie franchise based on the Stephen King book series. So hyped, in fact, is The Dark Tower, that fans have been ruthlessly sniffing around for any drips of info on the production as soon as word of the film got out.
It’s Tom’s first movie, so, like the internet fanboys and girls, he too is very excited — even if he hasn’t read the books, preferring to outsource the 4,250 pages to his dad. And of course, why read the books when you can star in the movie? IRL Tom mostly lives the quiet suburban life. But in The Dark Tower he is the adventurous Jake Chalmers, travelling to a dystopian parallel universe and joining forces with Idris Elba who plays a knight-cum-gunslinging-cowboy hero.
Together they have to fight forces of evil to protect the titular Dark Tower, the centre of the time-space continuum, otherwise all dimensions will come to an unspeakably bad end. That’s obviously not something anyone wants. Except for a super baddie appropriately named The Man in Black played by Matthew McConaughey, who was deep in character during filming and an incredibly “powerful presence on set”, as Tom explains.
After spending months filming together at epic locations like Kruger National Park in South Africa, Tom and Idris became good friends, and he learned a lot watching the actor at work. Tom’s back doing regular stuff — for now. “It’s crazy, it’s like two different worlds, they treat you really well, and you meet all these great people you see on TV and suddenly you’re home and it’s all just normal, you soon kind of forget doing all that stuff. It’s surreal.” We are sure his cat is happy to have him home though.
Credits
Text Clem de Pressigny
Photography Yann Faucher
Styling Adam Winder