Joshua Odjick Talks About His Big Stephen King Year With ‘The Long Walk’ and ‘It: Welcome to Derry’ (Exclusive)

It’s been a big year for Stephen King adaptations on the small and silver screens, and Joshua Odjick has been a central part of that, starring as Collie Parker in The Long Walk movie and Taniel in It: Welcome to Derry series.

It’s like a “wish upon a star,” the actor told TV Insider of his fortune to be in two high-profile King projects. “I feel very, very fortunate and grateful.”

Still, his journey to that point wasn’t always an easy one.  “I started filming Welcome to Derry before I shot The Long Walk, and I remember I didn’t even know what I was actually [trying out] for The Long Walk. It was like, ‘What am I looking at? This is an audition of a big death march, and I just gotta show them what I’ve got. Francis Lawrence is behind this.’”

When he prepared to film his audition, he was already stretched for time due to another project and got scammed by the studio he booked his shoot with, and had to do it in his own apartment instead. “I ended up starting with creating my own monologue…. During that time, I didn’t know that it was also another Stephen King thing. So it was like, ‘What?’ When I realized how everything connected, I was like, ‘No way! Nice.’”

For The Long Walk, Odjick said that he drew upon his own personality aspects a bit, saying, “What I used was the anger, the slight madness, the crying… the grief of just putting yourself in that space, it was pretty intense. I could only imagine what it was like and what you’d actually feel, and yeah, I felt like I’d miss my mom, too. So that’s what I was also going through that time, being homesick as well.”

Lionsgate / Everett Collection

With his Derry counterpart, Taniel, it was a different experience altogether. “Taniel is more protective,” he said. For his big mind interrogation scene with Chris Chalk as Dick Hallorann, he had to dig deep. “Taniel would’ve thought he was just going to do physical violence, and that’s about it, and he’d probably die with that information,” he explained of his character’s mindset. “He wouldn’t expect that this person was gifted … [So] you’re doing that complete 180, getting terrified in your in your seat. That’s what it felt like.”

Taniel, as Dick discovered in his mind, was one of the modern-day guardians of his people’s legend about the mythical monster that lurks beneath the town. “When I was filming, I didn’t think that was the big picture of it all. I just remember seeing that and how Taniel would interpret it from his own perspective and from his tribe’s perspective, was that this entity would be a skin walker, a wendigo, because it goes after based off of your fears, and it’s cannibalistic by nature.”

Once he intuited the scope of the story there, though, he was as blown away by it as any fan might be and prepared to meet the moment in bringing the representative of indigenous culture to the screen in an authentic way. “I was very fortunate to have a wonderful Indigenous representation team on and off set. There were obviously the actors, but also, I worked really hard to learn the language, the Penobscot language.” Odjick said he also appreciated the show for giving him “the opportunity to show more to the audience that we also have a voice, and also there’s history behind that; we weren’t just bloodthirsty savages trying to war against each other. There was a lot of misconstrued history that a lot of people don’t know about. So it’s nice to show.”

It: Welcome to Derry, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO