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These days, it’s impossible to talk about upcoming Stephen King adaptations without several mentions of fellow horror mastermind Mike Flanagan, whose latest film The Life of Chuck has yet to hit theaters in the midst of development on both a Dark Tower TV show and a series based on that most tragic of prom attendees, Carrie. The latter was only announced in October 2024, but the filmmaker has already shared quite the positive progress report, so it feels like a good time to make some casting wishes for the upcoming horror series.
Mike Flanagan’s Carrie Update
I know I wasn’t alone in thinking, given the pre-Halloween announcement, that Carrie might be pushed to a back burner while Mike Flanagan works the kinks out on his upcoming Exorcist reimagining. However, it sounds like the development process is rolling along quite smoothly, and that it was actually already happening when the news first broke. (Here’s what how told us Stephen King reacted to the news.)
The filmmaker responded to one follower’s comment about the adaptation on BlueSky, saying:
We are 6 weeks into the writers room!
Granted, no amount of time spent in the writers room works as a guarantee that a project will get made in the very near future, but it’s wild in hindsight to consider that the news about it broke so soon. Not that Mike Flanagan projects get turned down very much by studios these days, but there’s always that paranoia lurking. The same kind that one feels when the popular kids are being a little too nice.
So let’s be optimistic here with the hopes that casting news will be bandied about soon for Carrie, so that I can lay out my two top picks for who should play the telepathic teen. And yes, both of them are well-known in Mike Flanagan’s stable of recurring actors.
McKenna Grace
With Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (read our review) as her big 2024 release, McKenna Grace is just about as established in the horror genre as anyone can be at 18 years old. A shortlist of her past genre features: Suburban Gothic, Frankenstein, Amityville: The Awakening, Annabelle Comes Home, Malignant. On the TV side? The Vampire Diaries eps, both of the Bad Seed Lifetime movies, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, R.L. Stine’s Just Beyond and others.
Perhaps most important to this particular project, however, Grace also worked with Mike Flanagan on The Haunting of Hill House as Theodora Crain in the flashback timeline. She excelled in that role even at a younger age, and it would be surprising that the actress hasn’t reunited with Flanagan in the meantime, but then she’s been extremely busy in any given year across both movies and television.
Grace is currently invested in a handful upcoming 2025 films such as the Bob Odenkirk-starring sequel Nobody 2, the opioid drama Spider & Jessie, the thriller Anniversary and the satirical drama Slanted. But she currently doesn’t seem to have any major TV projects lined up outside of voicing Nocturna in Prime Video’s Batman: Caped Crusader. So what better way to fill that time than by playing a tortured teen hellbent on vengeance?
As proven by all the aforementioned projects and others, Grace delivers genuine performances no matter what genre is in focus, and is believable both as vulnerable and in a take-charge capacity. And I think she’d be able to work splendidly opposite anyone who’s cast to play Carrie’s zealous mother — Kate Seigel for the win! — and the other teen actors who’ll be involved.
As much as I think McKenna Grace would be the ideal option for Carrie White in Mike Flanagan’s new series, I’m also inclined to believe another younger actress from his projects could also deliver a nuanced performance that could twist up Stephen King’s source material in an interesting way: Kyliegh Curran.
For younger viewers, Curran is presumably best known for her role(s) in Disney’s Secrets of Sulphur Springs. But horror fans have celebrated her subdued but effective roles as Abra Stone in Mike Flanagan’s The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, which we were very fond of, and as Lenore Usher in the filmmaker’s Edgar Allen Poe tribute Fall of the House of Usher, which is easily among the best horrors streaming on Netflix.
Given that Flanagan is known for crafting adaptations that go beyond the source material, it’s not entirely outside the realm of believability that his creative team could craft Carrie with more diverse casting changes that could spin the central mother and daughter as a Black family, which would require far more nuanced takes on their religious beliefs and the school bullying that Carrie suffers through.
Regardless of whether one of my ideal choices gets picked or if the producers go with a completely different actress, I’ll be sat glued to my prom king throne waiting for more Carrie updates.