The Running Man is one of Stephen King’s bleakest futures, where working-class bodies are fed into state-approved spectacle. First adapted in 1987, the story now finds new life in Edgar Wright’s reimagining, with Glenn Powell in the lead and Jayme Lawson and Daniel Ezra grounding the reality TV carnage in emotional nuance and human stakes.
The Nerds of Color had a chance to talk with Grammy-nominated Jayme Lawson and All American star Daniel Ezra about their roles in Wright’s The Running Man. Lawson plays Sheila, a devoted wife and fiercely protective mother fighting to keep her family afloat, while Ezra’s Bradley is an underground organizer who exposes the Network’s exploitative practices and weaponized propaganda.
While the two never share the same scene, their roles remain pivotal to Ben’s (Glenn Powell) survival, with Sheila being the emotional anchor and Bradley providing a lifeline in more ways than one.
During our interview, Lawson talked about how her role wasn’t just the worried wife and how Ezra rounded Bradley as a real person rather than just “the resistance guy.”
“As much as he is all those things, and he is a revolutionary and wants to fight the system, he’s also a big brother, and he’s also a son,” Ezra said about his character Bradley, who speaks truth to power through a mask. “I wanted to bring as much of that family aspect as possible.”
And on the timely themes of Wright’s adaptation, Ezra said that people are much stronger together in the face of manufactured fear, manipulative propaganda, and violence. “Hopefully people take away is that we’re stronger together,” he said. “The only way for us to kind of rise above, you know, these issues is probably going to be together.”
For Lawson, Edgar Wright’s adaptation works because it starts by believing in the Richards family. Before the dystopian spectacle, she and Glenn Powell were encouraged to imagine Ben and Sheila as a couple with history, rhythm, and agency, not just victims of the system. “We spent a lot of time asking, ‘Who were Ben and Sheila before everything went wrong?’” she explains. “Having that investment in Ben in Glen made it so that it’s not just the worried wife, but there is like a full rhythm to how we move, even under duress, right? So you really can understand and see that there is a love there that is shared and that is then poured out on their daughter, but at the end of the day, that they’re a team.”
Based on the Stephen King novel published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1982, The Running Man follows Ben Richards, an impoverished citizen of Co-Op City. Desperate to survive and provide for his wife and sick daughter, Ben enters The Running Man, a deadly reality show that offers a grand prize of $1 billion to anyone who can evade its assassins for 30 days.
The Running Man is in theaters now.
