“I’m not taking any position on the death penalty, for or against,” says director Frank Darabont. “I decided long ago to let the audience draw its own conclusions on the issue.”.
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Darabont, who became friendly with King after Shawshank, soon realised, after starting work on the script, that Tom Hanks would be ideal for the part of Edgecomb. “He seemed so right for the character with the integrity and decency he projects,” notes the director. “While I was writing it, he kept popping into my head, which I should say doesn´t happen all that often for me. I usually try not to picture actors while I´m writing. But I can name at least six who were in my head when I was writing this, and I´m astonished to say I got them all: it´s my dream cast!”
Also featured in The Green Mile are David Morse and Barry Pepper as Edgecomb´s fellow guards; Bonnie Hunt as his wife; and James Cromwell as the prison governor. “They´re wonderful actors,” he says. “I was familiar with their body of work and I could put the pieces together, so it was a great pleasure to be able to offer those roles to those actors.”
 But Darabont admits he had no idea who was going to play the pivotal role of Coffey. After all, there aren´t that many seven-foot, three-hundred pound actors around. He scoured the entire country and auditioned several NBA basketball players before he finally came across Michael Clarke Duncan, who was the right weight and, at 6´5”, just tall enough - after a few camera tricks - to pass for seven foot.
Duncan, a former security guard from Chicago who moved to LA to pursue acting a mere three years ago, gives perhaps the most remarkable performance in the movie and is already being tipped for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. “I take John Coffey to be a seven-foot angel,” explains the amiable, deep-voiced Duncan. “To him, there´s only two ways to see things: it´s either good or bad. Coffey has that ability to see good and bad in people right away. When you have that ability, I think the world is sort of different for you.”
“When the camera was on me, I´d look at Tom and you´d see this two-time Academy-Award winner crying his butt off for you, to make your scene better”
Michael Clarke Duncan
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As a relative novice, Duncan was distinctly nervous at first, but soon found that Hanks was more than willing to help him. “Tom gives so much of himself that my emotions were very easy to bring up,” he says. “When the camera was on me, I´d look at Tom and you´d see this two-time Academy-Award winner crying his butt off for you, to make your scene better. I thought that was so wonderful. He didn´t have to do that: he could have used his stand-in. But he wants the movie to be so good that he´ll stay and do all the off-camera work that he has to. He would ask Frank, ‘Do you need anything else from me; do you need me to stay?´ He only left if Frank said, ‘No, we´re cool´.
“Frank is just like the ultimate director: he doesn´t holler, he doesn´t scream, he doesn´t get mad,” continues the actor. “What Frank would do was come and sit right in front of me and say, ‘How you doing? You OK?´ You feel this warmth coming from him, so you want to do right by this man - you want to be successful for him. He will take you as an actor and make you feel so good that you feel you can accomplish anything you want.”
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