‘The Life of Chuck’ director Mike Flanagan explains twist, Easter eggs

This article contains spoilers for The Life of Chuck.

The Life of Chuck isn’t your average apocalypse movie. 

Like the Stephen King novella that inspired it, director Mike Flanagan’s latest film is told in three acts, presented in reverse chronological order. However, the big twist, which slowly unfolds throughout the movie, is that the first act — the one depicting the end of the world — is all in the title character Chuck’s (Tom Hiddleston) mind. 

With the help of young Chuck’s (Benjamin Pajak) English teacher, played by Kate Siegel, the conceit is explained by Act III. But there are plenty of Easter eggs along the way to help the audience understand what’s going on. 

“Having as many details in the first section of the movie that pay off later, and you understand where Chuck encountered these things and how he populated this universe in his head, that was a really fun thing,” Flanagan tells Entertainment Weekly. 

The first act centers on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Marty Anderson, a divorced schoolteacher who, despite a series of apocalyptic events unfolding around him, becomes strangely fixated on new billboards popping up around town, each thanking a man named Chuck for “39 great years.” After a sinkhole takes over the town’s busiest intersection, Marty and his ex, Karen Gillan’s nurse Felicia Gordon, can’t help but reconnect (she’s noticed the strange ads, too). When cell service, internet, and cable all go out, Marty walks to Felicia’s house, where they sit together to watch the stars blink out one by one. 

It turns out that the Chuck from the billboards is Charles Krantz, a local man who’s dying of a brain tumor at the heartbreaking age of 39. The universe containing Marty and Felicia is only in Chuck’s head — an amalgamation of people and experiences from throughout his life.

“We tried very hard to make it clear in retrospect that the first 40 minutes exist out of time, that all the technology people are using is from different eras and all kind of blended together,” Flanagan says. “Whether or not everyone is able to pick up those threads on the first viewing, we hoped it would encourage more viewings. There are a lot of little connections there that are fun to make.”

The second and third acts tell the story of Chuck’s life. Some of the connections are easy to spot: Marty and Felicia are chaperones at Chuck’s school dance in Act III, and Carl Lumbly’s Sam Yarbrough, who Marty encounters on his walk to Felicia’s, is the funeral director when Chuck’s grandfather (Mark Hamill) dies.

But other Easter eggs are a little more difficult to spot: Actress Violet McGraw plays a young girl on roller skates who Marty encounters on his way to Felicia’s house in Act I. In Act II, Hiddleston’s adult Chuck briefly passes her after his impromptu street dance. Marty drives the same car as Chuck’s grandfather, and the boombox in Felicia’s nursing office that plays a commercial about Chuck is the same boombox that Samantha Sloyan’s Miss Rohrbacher uses to teach Chuck and his classmates dance in Act III. 

All three acts are also populated by the same background actors, adding a sense of familiarity to every face in the movie. “I loved that they would come back and be visible throughout,” Flanagan says of the small pool of background performers, “that there was a sense of echoing of the present in the past and that we could really hopefully trace the seeds of this imaginary world as he first encountered them.”

If you didn’t pick up on all the tiny connections between the three acts, don’t worry – some of the movie’s crew members didn’t either. 

“We erred on the side of trying to allow most of the specific revelations to exist in the back half of the movie, but to not flinch away from the moments that could have revealed it in the beginning,” Flanagan says. “And even then, I had a handful of crew members, and I’ve read even a handful of reviews out of TIFF that didn’t get it and that didn’t figure that out. And so that makes me feel like we kind of hopefully hit it right in the sweet spot, because my thing was it can’t be too obvious and it can’t be too obscure.” 

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If you do opt to see the movie again with the aim of Easter egg hunting, Flanagan hopes you stay in your seat until the Act III scene when Siegel “grabs the audience by the face and specifically explains what’s happening” with references to Walt Whitman’s famous “I contain multitudes.”

He jokes, “I just feel bad for anyone who’s in the bathroom or getting popcorn during that.”