Rob Reiner Didn’t Think Stephen King’s Misery Could Win an Oscar

The adaptation of Stephen King’s bestseller Misery remains the only movie based on the author’s work to win an Academy Award. The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, both by director Frank Darabont, snatched seven and four nominations, respectively, but they didn’t win any awards. Ultimately, in 1991, Kathy Bates was announced as the winner in the Best Actress category, but director Rob Reiner never believed his film could break the streak. The reason? Misery was a horror film, and he was well-trained enough to know the Academy doesn’t love those.

As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Reiner and Bates met at the 16th edition of the TCM Classic Film Festival, where they spoke about the 1990 classic that sees writer Paul Sheldon facing his worst nightmare: his biggest fan, who will stop at nothing until Sheldon finds a way to revive her favorite character. “I was horrified. When we went to [watch it in the] screening room, my face just drained of color, and I was like ‘F*ck, man,’” said Bates about seeing herself playing the iconic villain. She wasn’t very optimistic about her character’s legacy: “I was out at the very end of a branch, and I could just hear the saw. I was like, ‘This is the end of my career.'”

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By 1990, Reiner had already found success with his other Stephen King adaptation, Stand by Me, a film that had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. However, the coming-of-age drama was nowhere as macabre as Misery, and while he knew that Bates’ performance was gripping enough to draw the Academy’s attention, he told the actor that she was probably out of the race. Bates told Reiner at the event:

“You said, ‘You can campaign, but you’re not going to get it.’ You said because it’s a horror movie.”

Bates would eventually win an Academy Award as well as a Golden Globe, for her interpretation of the obsessed fan. Annie Wilkes is, undoubtedly, one of Stephen King’s best human villains, and we have no one but Bates to thank for this. Reiner says the following about the actor’s audition process:

“She read like two lines, I think, two or three lines, and I said, ‘That’s enough, you can do this.’ She was like, ‘What do you mean?’ I’m cutting her off. I’m like, ‘No, no, you can do this, I know you can do it.'”

Is ‘Misery’s Annie Wilkes the Best Stephen King Character of All Time?

Annie Wilkes Reads a Book to Paul Sheldon in Misery — Columbia Pictures

There are many memorable characters in the Stephen King film-verse. Jack Torrance from The Shining, John Coffey from The Green Mile, and Carrie White, of course, to name a few. Nevertheless, Annie Wilkes was a game-changer who represented something more tangible and inevitably realistic. When you come to think about it, Wilkes was just that, a fan whose greatest sin was unconditional love. Well, that and the ability to use a sledgehammer. Reiner continues to praise Bates’ skill at bringing to life the villain that made everyone take a step back from wanting to have loving fans:

“Kathy is such a dedicated actress. And she was so focused on wanting to make this work, she would take the character home with her a lot of times.

“I said to her, ‘You have to trust that you have one of the greatest acting instruments of all time, and you can leave that character here at the studio and go home and be yourself, and don’t be worried that you won’t be able to pick it back up again.'”

Source: Entertainment Weekly