Though the upcoming movie adaptation of Stephen King’s IT hasn’t been released yet, judging by the latest trailer for the film – actor Bill Skarsgard seems to at least be good at looking very creepy.
It turns out, though, that director Andrés Muschietti wanted to audition someone that would undoubtedly have been quite different.
Tilda Swinton.
Speaking with JoBlo, Muschietti said the following:
“She wasn’t available. No, no I swear to god. She was not. We had a slot to shoot the movie and she wasn’t available so she didn’t even audition. But of course, we all thought about it.”
That definitely would have been interesting.
Though, as we mentioned earlier, Skarsgard seems to be a pretty good choice, and it was even reported that he traumatized the child actors on the film’s set:
“It’s a really weird thing to go, ‘If I succeed at doing what I’m trying to do with this character, I’ll traumatize kids.’ On set, I wasn’t very friendly or goofy. I tried to maintain some sort of weirdness about the character, at least when I was in all the makeup. 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.”
He added:
“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 shit. What am I doing? What is this? This is horrible.”
IT hits theaters September 8th.