Bill Skarsgård has revealed that his version of Pennywise the clown brought the young actors on the set of Stephen King’s IT remake to tears in fear of his terrifying take on the demonic evil clown.
The original novel, as well as the TV-Movie which released in 1990, featured a split narrative following a group of social outcasts known as The Losers Club as both children and later as adults as they took on a demonic force who poses in the form of Pennywise, the evil child-killing clown. The new remake will instead focus solely on the children and will later be followed by a sequel featuring The Losers Club as adults as they defeat Pennywise for good.
Skarsgård, who has been acting since he was ten years old got his first big break on the Netflix series Hemlock Grove where his unsettling performance as Roman Godfrey would ultimately lead him to land the part of Pennywise in the IT remake directed by Andy Muschietti. The actor recently spoke with TheWrap when he recounted a scene from the film which shot last summer in Toronto:
“At one point, they set up this entire scene, and these kids come in, and none of them have seen me yet. Their parents have brought them in, these little extras, right? And then I come out as Pennywise, and these kids — young, normal kids — I saw the reaction that they had.”
Skarsgård went on to reveal that one of the stars became so terrified he began to cry moments before Muschietti called action on the scene in an attempt to capture the organic fear on display:
“Some of them were really intrigued, but some couldn’t look at me, and some were shaking. This one kid started crying. He started to cry and the director yelled, ‘Action!’ And when they say ‘action,’ I am completely in character. So some of these kids got terrified and started to cry in the middle of the take, and then I realized, ‘Holy s—. What am I doing? What is this? This is horrible.”
The film stars Finn Wolfhard, Jaeden Lieberher, Wyatt Olef, Jack Grazer, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Chosen Jacobs, and Bill Skarsgård.
Based on Stephen King’s best-selling novel. A group of young kids face their biggest fears when they seek answers to the disappearance of children in their hometown of Derry, Maine. They square off against an evil clown named Pennywise, whose history of murder and violence dates back for centuries.
IT hits theaters September 8, 2017.
Source: TheWrap