Bill Skarsgård breathed life into Pennywise for the last six years, but a new killer clown might be coming into the picture in the upcoming HBO Max prequel, Welcome to Derry.
Skarsgård’s intensity and flair as Pennywise were so powerful that you could almost feel them permeating through the screen. It was an absolutely unnerving experience, watching him become a larger-than-life terror, but the prequel is another layer of the legend of It entirely, and it seems as if those at HBO Max are considering a different Pennywise.
In a chat with The Direct, Skarsgård shares that he knows about the prequel series, but the next bit of news won’t be music to your ears if you loved his take on the terrifying entity, specifically the clown version.
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll see what they come up with and what they do with it. I’m, as of now, not currently involved in it.”
Of course, as The Direct points out, there are a number of storytelling avenues that Welcome to Derry could go down while allowing a window of opportunity if Skarsgård wants to return to the role in the future. While fans will undeniably want to learn how It came to be and what the origin story there is, there are ways to incorporate Skarsgård’s version of Pennywise into the account if everyone involved wants it.
Skarsgård offered some excellent advice for the next person who will take up the mantle, and his most significant piece of advice is not to take the role too seriously; to find what works about personifying that terror and to make it work for them.
“And if someone else gets to do it, my advice would just be: do it your own, make it your own, have fun with it, you know what I mean? What I thought was so pleasurable about that character was how incredibly abstract he was. If you start reading Stephen King’s cocaine-binged book, you just go like, ‘What the hell?’ I mean there’s so, so many weird tantrums and abstractions that you can kind of sit, and decipher, and that’s what I did with the character, and I really enjoy that aspect, and then inform the character, and the book is really a gift that way, so if someone would take it on, it’s just, go through the book, and find all the clues, and they’re so out there that you can kind of make your own conclusions to them.”
It’s interesting to assume that every person who becomes a version of Pennywise will bring something different to the table, depending on what they take from the source material. It creates a lot of space for everything from humor to heart and hair-raising horror in a variety of ways, and we scary movie fans reap the benefits every time.
Welcome to Derry has no set release date yet, but We Got This Covered will keep you updated as we find out more.