Oh Hey, It’s Our First Look At Zachary Quinto In NOS4A2

Entertainment Weekly has been dropping all kinds of first looks this week, and while it's easy to be distracted by photos from Us and John Wick 3, let's not overlook this little gem: 

Zachary Quinto, is that you, bro? It is indeed the artist occasionally known as Nu Spock. Buried underneath all that old geezer makeup is Quinto in EW's exclusive first look at AMC's adaptation of the Joe Hill novel NOS4A2. In the series, which premieres sometime in 2019, Quinto plays the villainous Charlie Manx – a vampire-esque antagonist who basically sucks the souls out of children keep himself looking young and spry. Using his supernatural Rolls Royce Wraith (which has a vanity plate reading "NOS4A2" – like Nosferatu), he takes the kiddos to a hellscape known as "Christmasland," where they become dead-eyed, murderous little shits that do his evil bidding. Enter Vic McQueen (played in the series by Ashleigh Cummings), a young woman whose wildly creative mind may hold the key to stopping Manx. 

Based on Entertainment Weekly's description of the plot, the series might diverge from the source material quite a bit: 

Ashleigh Cummings plays the show’s heroine Vic McQueen, who is about to enter her senior year at a high school in Massachusetts. “She’s a working-class kid who has such a creative mind that it actually gives her a kind of superpower,” says showrunner Jami O’Brien. “Charlie Manx becomes aware of her and realizes that she may be bad news for him, so he has to figure out pretty quickly what to do about her.”

In the book, Vic discovers her ability when she's a kid; she can drive her scooter over her town's dialpidated bridge and transport herself to a specific time and place. When she's a teenager, Vic has a harrowing encounter with Manx after crossing the bridge, and she barely makes it out alive. She winds up marrying the dude who saved her life and having a kid of her own. Several years later, Vic has mostly forgotten all about ol' Charlie Manx... until he returns and kidnaps Vic's kid, forcing her to relive her traumatic past in an effort to rescue her son. None of that is spoiler-y, mind you – it's all in the official plot summary for the book, which was originally published in 2013. (Locke & Key fans might want to pick up a copy, which comes with illustrations by artist Gabriel Rodriguez.) 

EW's description seems to indicate we'll be meeting Vic when she's a teenager – and a little older than she was when she first encountered Manx. It's unclear if the 10-episode series will skip ahead to when Vic is adult and her own son is abducted by Manx, but looking over the IMDb cast list, I don't see any mention of Lou, the guy Vic winds up marrying after he saves her. Speaking of which, the series also stars Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Chris McQueen (Vic's dad) and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (who was great in Lady Dynamite) as Bing Partridge, Charlie's lackey. According to EW, if the initial 10-episode season is a hit, showrunner Jami O'Brien hopes to expand the story in additional seasons.