After Tim Curry’s portrayal of Pennywise the Clown scared an entire generation, actor Bill Skarsgård knew he had big shoes to fill for this year’s IT Movie. He knew he didn’t want to do the same thing Curry did, as he wanted to make the performance something entirely new. As Skarsgård himself said back in September:
“It was always important for me to reinvent It and reinterpret It in a different way. I sort of grew up with the Tim performance and I was very familiar with it and a huge fan as an actor, so my process of preparing for the role was, “okay this needs to be different” and I think we did that, I think this Pennywise is different and they can stand alone – there’s no need to compare them as you can appreciate both but it was important to me to do something new and something original with the take on the character.”
Reinvent it he did, and the actor had a pretty interesting story as to how he came up with Pennywise’s voice for the movie while speaking with Entertainment Weekly:
“Something I found disturbing was that I wanted Pennywise to feel entirely unpredictable at every moment, and also his voice doesn’t have a predictable way of sounding. It can go kind of up and down and crackle, you can go really high pitch and low pitch, even in the same sentence. I wanted it to be sort of colorful in that way. It can be soft and it can be whispery and it can be alluring, then it crackles and breaks a lot of times. He’s not entirely there, you know?”
We’ll see Skarsgård’s Pennywise return in IT: Chapter 2, which the actor says he hopes we explore more of:
“The first movie worked so well at what it is trying to do, I think, and ultimately that is the kids’ story, and you follow these kids and you sort of fall in love with these kids. And the second one will be the adult story. And I think the right way to do it is to make that movie actively different. … I think there might be worth exploring sort of the psychological aspects of horror, but also maybe the sort of cosmological existence of this being. What is he, and where does he come from?”
IT is currently available on digital download while the Blu-ray releases January 9th, 2018.
What did you think of IT? Were you a fan of Bill Skarsgård’s performance? Tell us in the comments!