Doctor Sleep & The Shining Theory: Lloyd the Bartender Was Never a Real Person

The Shining and Doctor Sleep feature bartender characters that call themselves Lloyd, but was there ever a real Lloyd the bartender at the Overlook? Movie history is full of lengthy gaps between installments, but there are few longer breaks than the nearly 40 years that elapsed between the release of director Stanley Kubrick’s iconic horror film The Shining and its 2019 sequel Doctor Sleep. Of course, that’s partially due to Stephen King not writing his Shining sequel novel until 2013, over 35 years after the original book’s publication.

Because of the decades between films, it was necessary to recast every character that returns from The Shining, as Danny Torrance had grown from a child into an adult, and everyone else was a posthumous presence, having died in the intervening years. While it was known in advance that characters like Dick Hallorann and Wendy Torrance would appear, and be played by new actors, Doctor Sleep also surprised fans with the unexpected inclusion of two other Shining characters. Well, sort of.

As anyone who’s seen Doctor Sleep now knows, when Danny returns to The Overlook Hotel, he stops in the famous Gold Room, and while there has a chat with Lloyd the bartender. Except it’s not the Lloyd from The Shining, it’s now Jack Torrance himself, whose soul the hotel absorbed after his death. We have a guess as to why that is.

Doctor Sleep & The Shining Theory: Lloyd the Bartender Was Never a Real Person

As seen in Doctor Sleep, the version of Jack Torrance (played by Henry Thomas) that identifies himself to Danny as Lloyd seems mostly unaware of his former identity, outside of brief flashes of recognition where some of the old Jack seeps out. While the transition isn’t shown, the director’s cut of Doctor Sleep also includes a follow-up scene in The Shining‘s bright red bathroom in which Jack has changed attire and appears to be portraying the same persuasive role the ghost of former caretaker Delbert Grady did in the prior film. Shining fans will remember that when confronted by Jack Torrance with knowledge of his former life, Grady insists that Jack is mistaken, and that he’s “always” been at the Overlook.

The Shining gives no backstory on Lloyd, and Jack improbably knows his name without having met before, suggesting that the hotel just planted that suggestion in his mind. While the natural assumption up until Doctor Sleep was that Lloyd was simply a real bartender that once worked at the Overlook and eventually died there, the fact that Jack has now been swapped into the same role suggests that when the hotel absorbs a soul into its pantheon of ghosts, the malevolent structure then places its pawns into whatever pre-made roles it sees fit, regardless of what they did in life. Jack was made Lloyd the bartender to try and tempt Danny into drinking, and then swiftly shifted into Grady’s old waiter role when that became most convenient for the Overlook.

This suggests that there never actually was a Lloyd the bartender, and instead, that was simply a role invented by the hotel for its own sinister use. If that’s true though, one wonders who The Shining‘s Lloyd was before being placed in that role. A prior caretaker? A guest of the hotel? Someone who was also driven murderously insane? The possibilities are endless, and make one wonder how many of the ghosts at the Overlook started out as someone completely different.

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