By Michaela Gordoni
THE KING OF KINGS cast and crew are sharing why the movie, a retelling of Charles Dickens’ “love letter” to his kids, is so special.
“It’s a Charles Dickens story,” explained actor Fred Tatasciore. “It’s his interpretation, and it’s his love letter basically to try to explain this story of Jesus to his children, and so…it’s a lot to unpack, this story.”
Legendary voice actor James Arnold Taylor said, “Now Charles Dickens wrote this, ‘The Life of Our Lord,’ this story for his children back in 1846. It wasn’t published until 1934, I think, and he was very adamant about teaching his children about Christ, and this now kind of translates really well because we live it through Walter, his youngest.”
Roman Griffin Davis voices Walter, and Sir Kenneth Branagh voices Dickens in the movie.
“Watching it with little kids, they relate to Walter, and I think that that’s really kind of a cool part,” Taylor continued.
Casting director and executive producer Jamie Thompson said Dickens’ family read his story every Christmas.
“…Every Christmas for… his entire life and then his children as adults throughout their lives,” he said. “So what this movie does is pick up on that idea…We have Charles Dickens telling the story of Jesus’s life to his young son Walter, and Walter’s basically our audience, you know.”
“The idea is that Dickens’ storytelling is so immersive that you know his son feels like he’s there,” Thompson said. “He feels like he’s walking among Jesus and the disciples.”
Director and writer Seong-ho Jang was inspired by Dickens’s life at the time he wrote the story, and he tried to portray it in the film.
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“At his time, Charles Dickens did a lot of drama readings on stage,” he explained. “So I thought, okay, why don’t we adapt the way he tells the story to the audience at the drama reading to the way he tells the story of Jesus to his son? So that way, if we are successful, we thought that would bea very interesting film and also, at the same time, a very unique one.”
Jang is certainly right about that. Movieguide®’s review notes that the “Dickensian way of storytelling” adds an intriguing and special layer to the story.
Another thing that Jang honed in on was showing Jesus’ story from a child’s perspective.
“Because usually for the adults, if they receive some kind of message, it may be interpreted in a different way — with respect to their perspective, experiences, and perception about something and their thoughts on subjects,” Jang told Animation Scoop last month. “I wanted the audience to feel and embrace the things delivered from the movie, from the perspective of a young child.”
THE KING OF KINGS came out on April 11 and currently has a 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s currently screening in thousands of theaters across America.
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