feature image photo by Jon Kopaloff / Stringer via Getty Images
The Long Walk is the latest in the long list of Stephen King film adaptations, following 2024’s The Life of Chuck and 2025’s The Monkey. Though the dystopian novel it’s based on — published under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman — came out five years after he exploded onto the scene with Carrie, it was actually the first full novel King wrote. He started it during his freshman year at University of Maine around 1966, and the story is often seen as a critical metaphor for the Vietnam War. In its alternate version of the U.S., there’s an annual competition where 100 young men must walk at a consistent pace of four miles per hour or else be killed for receiving too many warnings. Only one can survive, and that winner gets whatever he wants for the rest of his life.
The movie version is set in a totalitarian post-apocalyptic future and maintains those painful scenes of boys having to walk endlessly and find comfort in each other in their quests to get rich. Nobody knows torturing young people in post-apocalyptic futures better than director Francis Lawrence, who has helmed every Hunger Games installment since Catching Fire.
Jordan Gonzalez, best known as Ash Romero from Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, plays Harkness #49. Harkness is an observant teen and journalist who aspires to be a novelist. He maintains a journal to compose a novel based on his experiences.
We spoke with Gonzalez in a Zoom interview about how he got the part of Harkness, how he made the character uniquely his own, and his desire to examine various facets of the human experience shaped by his own. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Rendy: How’d you land the role of Harkness?
Jordan: I had heard about The Long Walk from one of my acting coaches, and she was like, “Hey, have you heard about this project? There’s a bunch of guys that you’re right for.” And I was like, “No, I haven’t.” I looked into it and I went, “Shit, I want to do this.”
Lucky enough, I got an audition the following week. Originally I had auditioned for Olson, sent in my tape for him, and got an immediate response, “Hey, Francis really loved your take. Would you be open to reading for Harkness?” I was like, “Of course. Absolutely.”
I auditioned for Harkness, then went into a director session. Honestly, I just knew that this was going to be a cool moment for me to flesh out who I thought he was and while also trying to stay as true to who the fans thought he is as well and honoring that. Plus, no one is a better Olson than Ben [Wang] and everyone landed exactly where they were meant to!
I had two days to turn it around, but in those two days, I walked, I learned my lines, and I fleshed him out walking. I wanted to get his cadence while walking, while he’s out of breath at night when he’s scared. It was a cool experience to build someone from the ground up while also stretching myself physically, mentally, emotionally in a lot of ways.
Rendy: Tell me about your walking process and how it influenced your development of Harkness and his journalist identity?
Jordan: He always, to me, was the audience. He doesn’t speak a lot, he observes a lot. And for me it was a way for the audience to see through his lens. So I would write my lines as I was walking in my own journal over and over and over again and how that would feel actually physically walking at that pace while continuously trying to write, which is so difficult.
And for me, his walk is fast, silly, goofy while also making sure he’s playing by the rules so that he lasts as long as he can, so that his book can make it out alive. But I would walk at night with little to no clothes on, trying to get the temperature and how that would feel like. And walking through strange neighborhoods to feel scared and threatened by something. I had a lot of coyotes in my neighborhood at that time, and so I would pass by packs of coyotes as if maybe that were the Major and his men and a lot of things like that, which really helped inform me on the day.
Rendy: What was it like going from your small screen experiences on Pretty Little Liars to, is this your first feature?
Jordan: It’s definitely the first, and it’s definitely the biggest. I did a short film anthology that lives as a feature, but my portion in it is a short, so technically, yeah, it’s a feature.
Honestly, I was a little intimidated. I had no idea if it was going to be different, and it was different in such a beautiful way from the day that I got there and walked into the prop warehouse. It was like just tables upon tables of old vintage items where we were allowed to, and honestly pushed, to walk through those rows and see what called to us and each of our characters about what they would have specifically in their bags. It was the same sort of thing walking into the wardrobe room; there was this big board of inspiration of 1950s Stand By Me-esque photos and just racks of clothes.
And it was not, “Hey, this is what we think you should wear.” It was, “Hey, what do you think he would wear? And what variations of that wardrobe do you think he would wear throughout the walk? What do you think he would wear when he dies? What do you think he would wear when he’s cold or hot, when it’s raining? What would he have in his bag to fidget with?” And of course, for me, the big thing is the journal, which I still have.
[Here, Jordan shows off his journal from the movie that features handwritten notes, a dead flower, and a 7 of spades card]
Rendy: Oh my Goodness.
Jordan: I was lucky enough to bring it with me, and it’s filled with things that I actually wrote. As if I was him. And for me, Jordan, this is a little nod to me. The number seven has always followed me in my life. And whenever I’m on the right path or the universe is telling me that things are going well, that number always pops up for me. And funny enough, I am number seven on the call sheet.
Rendy: Wow, that’s beautiful. That’s fate right there.
Jordan: It was fate and it lined up that way. I have this dead flower, which is from a conversation that Francis and I had while building him out. I thought Harkness to me is the pure light of innocence and a little naive of a young kid who just wants his work to live past him, whether that’s him dying on the walk or him living in the world he lives in that’s limiting him. His book is more important than his life, and his legacy is more important than him. And so I would see all of those little yellow flowers all throughout one of the plains.
Also, tying into the Vietnam War aspect of peace and journalism, journalists are always trying to tell the truth and be peacekeepers. And that image of people like hippies in the ‘70s handing out flowers to try to create peace really stuck with me. I saw that imagery, and I was like, that’s perfect. And so I was like, “Hey Francis, how do you feel if Harkness starts with a flower tied into his jacket pocket? And as he dies, the flowers die, and as he’s starting to unravel and starting to really realize what he signed up for, the imagery of the flower is there as well.” And of course, by the time he ‘gets his ticket,’ the flower’s no longer on his jacket pocket. It’s sort of like a loss of innocence and understanding has gone with that flower, and he gets to go back home.
TV is a beautiful medium. It is so fun to do, but it is formulaic. You get to dive so much deeper, and really build out all of these things, because there’s time that allows it in film. And that was just the coolest thing for me as an artist that I had not gotten to do yet. I do for all of my auditions, but I hadn’t got to do it yet where it lives somewhere forever.
And so for me, of course, my love for TV and PLL, I will always be so grateful for that show. They took a chance on me when I had just started. I had not done anything, nor did I know that I wanted to act. And they plucked me out of obscurity and gave me this opportunity to be on this fantastic show with all these incredible actors who had been doing it for years. Without them giving me the opportunity to really learn as I went, I don’t know that I would be here talking to you now about The Long Walk. That is so cool to be able to do that and to be able to stretch yourself in that way.
Rendy: Were there any activities that you guys did to lift your spirits given the bleakness of the film?
Jordan: It is extremely hard to walk 20 miles a day in the heat with that weight and shooting chronologically as well, where you either get to build these friendships with even background kids, stunt workers who walked with us every single day, and one day they don’t get to say goodbye. Seeing those familiar faces be gone without even being able to say bye to them was another added layer. When one of the characters went down, I started crying out of nowhere, and I didn’t think that it would have that much of an effect on me.
When you are so immersed in it and you see that and you feel someone’s performance, it only amplifies all of us realizing how important this all is, but also how hard it all is. And then, we all would talk afterwards about how that death made us feel. But the light side of it was that, yeah, we went on walks together, we went in Stargaze together when we were in those random places.
Rendy: What are some takeaways you felt that you learned from your experience with this movie and what would you hope to bring along with you towards the next project you take on?
Jordan: I think I have the confidence to really throw ideas at the wall and try different things. And I think that’s something that I am learning as I grow as a human and also as an artist. I’ve only been doing it for five years. And again, I didn’t know I would ever be doing this. I never grew up thinking that I wanted to be an actor. I was an athlete my entire life. And when I started doing this, I completely fell in love with it. And for me, I love playing with the raw human experience. And I think that the throughline from Ash to Harkness is like each of them have a lot of heart and a lot of truth and a lot of honesty in who they are, but they exist.
Ash has a lot of worldly flaws against him, Harkness has a lot of worldly flaws against him that shaped them as young men. And I think for me, I want to continue to flesh out all of those different versions of the human experience and what that looks like and really dig deep into different versions of how the world affects different people.
Rendy: What are some different genres you’d like to explore in the future?
Jordan: I love-hate this question, because I’ve just started, so there’s so much I want to do. I love Heath Ledger. And for me, he is and was such a beautiful person who was able to do so many different things. And I think for me, because of my lived experience, I don’t want to be pigeonholed, and I want to be able to play a villain, and I want to be able to play a rock star, and I want to be able to play a superhero, and I want to be able to play the bleeding heart, romantic lead and all of these things because I am a fully faceted person. And so for me, I really look up to him, because he was really able to do that in all of his work. Everything is so different and everything is without bounds. And so for me, just if I’m lucky, I hope that I get to do things without bounds.
The Long Walk is in theaters now.
Um, for those of us who have NO idea who this guy is, it might be helpful to tell us he’s trans? [Because otherwise, I was left w/ “OK, he’s sorta cute, but why is here here?”]