Cast your mind back to September of 2017, and you’ll no doubt remember the moment when Bill Skarsgård found himself thrust into the Hollywood spotlight after his on-screen menace (read: Pennywise) helped rack up a staggering $700 million at the global box office.
Skarsgård’s cackling and downright terrifying clown became something of a pop culture sensation, too, and one need only look at the number of Pennywise-inspired Halloween costumes and memes for evidence of that. All of this only puts even more pressure on It: Chapter Two, though, what with Skarsgård expected to reprise as Stephen King’s abomination next year.
Only this time, there’s a twist: barring a handful of flashbacks, Pennywise will be looking to scare an entirely new cast in the adult Losers’ Club, and though such a change of pace presents its own unique challenges, Bill Skarsgård has revealed in a recent interview that for him, the hard part about reprising the role is that he’s finding that he has to re-adapt himself due to how popular the character’s become.
This time around, because the movie became such a phenomenon, it’s almost like I’m re-adapting myself. The character became very iconic. Pennywise became a star. You see Instagram posts of people dressing up or dressing their kids as Pennywise for Halloween. It’s all over the place. LeBron James was Pennywise. How surreal is that? So, it became this completely universal thing, outside of the thing. That’s not me. I can’t even relate myself to it anymore. And now that I’m going back and doing it, it’s such a bizarre thing. I don’t think I’ll ever really experience anything like it. It’s this dualistic thing of me and the work and the character, and then the thing that it became, but it’s fun.
Continuing on, the actor said that despite all that, he’s still able to access Pennywise with ease, calling the whole process “intuitive.”
We had the read-through and I’ve done some rehearsals, and I was surprised how much of the character was just there already. I instantly could access him again, like it was yesterday that we wrapped the first one. It was just all there. So, the work and preparation and figuring out the character is almost intuitive, which is pretty cool. It’s a very strange thing, but I’m trying to enjoy the ride, as much as I can.
Though not terribly revealing, if nothing else, Skarsgård’s comments here only serve to remind us further that the actor’s fully committed to bringing us another terrifying performance when It: Chapter Two slithers into theaters, and we simply cannot wait to see what both him and the studio have in store when the sequel arrives on September 6th, 2019.