James Marsden in Magic Mike? Apparently, it almost happened.

During the Tuesday, Jan. 5 episode of The Late Late Show with James Corden, The Notebook star shared the real reason why he passed on the stripper-themed movie.

“I had fear I would be edited out of the movie,” the actor confessed. “Just all my lines would be cut out and I’d be an extra just rushing around in a g-string so I think it was a lack of courage on my part.”

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For Stephen King fans, CBS All Access’ new limited series The Stand has big shoes to fill. Not only is the book beloved by readers as well as critically acclaimed — and even comes in two versions, the original 1978 version and an unabridged edition published in 1990 — but the novel was previously adapted into a well-received miniseries in 1994 that featured a cast of more than 125 speaking roles along with performances by Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Jamey Sheridan, Laura San Giacomo, Ed Harris, and many more. And when it comes to those performances, Sinise’s Stu Redman was especially stand out, even earning the actor a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. For James Marsden, who takes on the Stu Redman role in this new series, it was important to do right by not only Sinise’s work, but King’s novel as well.

Speaking with ComicBook.com, Marsden said that stepping into the role was “tricky” but that this new series is telling the story for a new generation.

“Gary kind of knocked it out of the park with that, in the miniseries, and Mick Garris [director of the 1994 miniseries] did a great job with it, with much less time, right? They had just a few hours and we have nine. But it’s always tricky stepping into the shoes of someone else who’s done a really incredible job with the trail,” Marsden said. “I think that said, we’ve not updated it but we’re retelling this story for a new generation and a new audience. It’s just another interpretation of the book and so, obviously, I want to right by the character in the book and by Stephen King and Gary Sinise, everyone who’s been a part of an iteration of this in the past.”

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MUMBAI: Hollywood actor James Marsden’s latest series “The Stand” may be set in an apocalyptic backdrop, but he believes the show is a timeless story that has much more to it than a deadly virus wreaking havoc on the world.

Written and created by “The Fault in our Stars” director Josh Boone and “Homeland” scribe Ben Cavell, the series is based on celebrated author Stephen King’s 1978 novel of the same name.

It follows a story of a group of survivors whose lives intersect after a deadly virus, “Captain Trips”, damages the world’s population.

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Adapting any piece of Stephen King‘s work is a feat. But adapting The Stand? That’s a challenge on a whole other level, and one that CBS All Access it taking on this winter. During a series of interviews that included Decider, series executive producers Benjamin Cavell and Taylor Elmore, and star James Marsden revealed what they have planned for this new miniseries.

Though The Stand is one of the longest books in King’s vast bibliography, Cavell and Elmore opted for a more concise adaptation. CBS All Access’ miniseries only contains nine episodes, the first of which bounces between multiple timelines. Creating this fast-paced first episode was all part of Cavell and Elmore’s plan for the series.

“Obviously having a non-linear narrative differentiates us from the original miniseries, which has the same linear narrative as the book. But also, when we were first sitting down to lay all this out, it felt to me that everyone’s seen Contagion and Outbreak. I love those movies. But did we want to make people sit through three episodes of the world dying before we got to the meat of our story?” Cavell explained. “Look, for me — and I know Taylor feels this way too — The Stand is not really a book about a pandemic. I mean, of course it is, or part of it is or it has a pandemic in it. But really the pandemic is the mechanism by which the world gets emptied out so that our heroes can walk to Mordor to cross a kind of dead world.”

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James Marsden stars in the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Stand” as Stu, an everyman who’s caught in an apocalyptic pandemic.

Premiering Thursday, Dec. 17 on CBS All Access and based on King’s novel first published in 1978, “The Stand” follows a large cast of characters whose lives intersect after a deadly strain of flu wipes out most of the world’s population — leaving the survivors to fight and establish new social systems. It was previously adapted for a 1994 ABC miniseries starring Gary Sinise as Stu.

“I love that it isn’t just about survival,” Marsden, 47, tells The Post. “It becomes this existential and spiritual journey. What happens when we hit the reset button? Who do we become and what choices do we make? I like exploring all those themes.

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The X-Men, Westworld and Enchanted star James Marsden, 47, takes on the fate of humanity as Stu Redman in The Stand (Dec. 17 on CBS All Access). The limited series, which also stars Whoopi Goldberg and Jovan Adepo, revisits Stephen King’s apocalyptic story of a world devastated by a plague that wipes out a huge percentage of the population, and then plunges survivors into a life-and-death struggle between good and evil.

Why a series about a plague during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The book is over 40 years old and it’s one of Stephen’s greatest hits. We had not planned for COVID this year. Once you get into the show, it becomes less about a pandemic and more about what happens to humanity afterwards.

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James Marsden was in the only place he could be. Not in his acting career, which has been fruitfully darting this way and that for years—quite literally, sitting for a recent phone call in his car in the driveway of his Los Angeles home, the only spot where he gets decent cell reception. “If it sounds like I’m talking from a submarine, let me know and I’ll change positions,” he said sheepishly.

Marsden has, over nearly three decades in Hollywood, proven surprisingly amenable to change, recalibrating his hunky star profile to best fit each disparate role that has come his way. He and I were talking during the COVID shutdown because I, perhaps like many of you, recently noticed in my unending watching of things just how ubiquitous James Marsden seems to be. Especially, of late, on television. Marsden wrapped his two-season run as a hapless and later murderous robot cowboy on HBO’s massive sci-fi series Westworld in 2018; in the spring of 2020, he appeared in both the lauded FX on Hulu period series Mrs. America (as a smarmy politician and TV host who doesn’t do right by Cate Blanchett) and the Netflix sleeper hit Dead to Me, as the (spoiler alert!) twin brother of a man murdered by Christina Applegate in the season-one finale.

In the fall, Marsden will migrate to CBS All Access as part of the ensemble of a much-anticipated adaptation of Stephen King’s doorstopper 1978 novel The Stand. From science fiction to historical drama (with some satire), to contemporary dark comedy, to plague apocalypse is a pretty wide range to walk, yet Marsden has never seemed uncomfortable in building his curio cabinet of roles. He has become a true journeyman actor, one whose matinee-idol good looks can sometimes belie the thinking, shape-shifting performer behind them.

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James Marsden is everywhere. He knows it too. “I get texts from people saying, ‘You are on my TV screen all the f**king time. How do you do this?’ I’m like, ‘I’m sorry!’”

There’s truth to the ubiquity of his Hollywood existence. Since coming onto the scene in the early ’90s, Marsden, 46, has amassed an extensive resume of more than 75 credits (and counting), featuring roles so different from the others that it’s nearly impossible to put him in a box. If you’ve thought it, he’s probably done it. From playing the hot guy on The Nanny’s first episode to earning superhero cred as Cyclops in the X-Men franchise, to capturing hearts as the dreamy leading man in 27 Dresses, to dipping into the secretive world of Westworld as an innocent cowboy, Marsden has led a charmed career — a fact he’d be the first to acknowledge. (When you can check Disney prince off the proverbial bucket list, you’ve reached a different level.) More impressively, he hasn’t slowed down since.

When Marsden hops on the phone on a Tuesday afternoon in June, he opens with an apology for mixing up the interview times as his Oklahoma niceness peeks through. “I told my PR rep, ‘I’m an actor. I never said I was smart,’” he playfully jokes. Somehow, we doubt that to be true; after all, he’s been more than a little busy. By mid-March, right before a nationwide lockdown was ordered, Marsden wrapped three incredibly varied TV projects during a six-month span, hopping back and forth from Netflix’s dark comedy Dead to Me to FX on Hulu’s period piece Mrs. America, to CBS All Access’ upcoming Stephen King drama The Stand. Ask him how he pulled off triple duty and even he doesn’t know.

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The Season 1 finale of Dead to Me could have easily been the end of James Marsden’s involvement with the Netflix dramedy. His manipulative and malicious character Steve Wood was undeniably dead after he confronted Jen (Christina Applegate), who knew he was responsible for her husband’s death, and aggressively demanded access to his ex-fiancée Judy (Linda Cardellini), who’d been living with Jen. Apart from flashbacks that might explain exactly how Steve wound up face down in Jen’s pool, it was hard to envision a future for the character on the series.

Creator Liz Feldman had an idea for how to bring Marsden back for Season 2, though. He’d return as Ben, Steve’s “semi-identical” twin who looked exactly like him but was his polar opposite in terms of personality. And yes, the show leaned right into the soapiness of that development, starting with an absurdly comedic introductory scene, which finds Jen opening her front door to find the man whose body she stuffed in a deep freezer suddenly standing right in front of her with a cheesy grin.

Ben’s arrival on the show is just as stunning for audiences as it is for Jen, but it’s virtually impossible not to be won over by the guy as the season progresses. Instead of oozing arrogance and cruelty like Steve, Ben is completely disarming and leads with self-deprecating humor. His surprise arrival does more than just keep Marsden in the picture for Season 2. As Ben, Marsden becomes an essential component of the show’s action, heart, and humor and remains an absolute scene-stealer — quite a feat considering both Applegate and Cardellini are still firing on all cylinders this season.

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The second season of “Dead to Me” on Netflix started with one hell of a twist: Steve (James Marsden), who Jen (Christina Applegate) killed and then secretly buried with a little help from her friend — and his ex — Judy (Linda Cardellini), had a twin brother. The two had the same face but seemed to be worlds apart in personality — but by the end of the season they ended up sharing a more cosmic connection: Both were responsible for dangerous hit-and-runs.

“I love the perversity of the show,” Marsden tells Variety. “To me, that comedy can come from that is more of a mirror on the way we are in real life.”

As a series as a whole, “Dead to Me” began with the aftermath of Steve and Judy’s hit-and-run — although it was not known from the start that they were at fault for the car accident that took Jen’s husband’s life. Instead, the show started with her meeting Judy in a grief group, which Judy was attending to get to know Jen after the guilt from her role in the accident was weighing so heavily on her. The truth was slowly unraveled over the course of the first season. Similarly, the truth about Steve’s death gets unraveled over the 10 episodes in Season 2, and at the end of that second season, Ben learns his missing twin’s body has been found and he falls off the wagon, resulting in him drunk-driving into the side of the new car Jen just bought for her son. Thankfully this time, both Jen, who was driving, and Judy, who was in the passenger seat, lived.

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