I’m pretty scared of clowns, I’ll admit it. They frighten me, and I’m a grown-ass adult. So I can’t even imagine being a kid on the set of the movie It, where Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard) terrified the child actors until they were moved to tears.
Itis Stephen King’s 1986 novel, originally made into a TV miniseries in 1990 starring Tim Curry. The book is getting a two-part remake in 2017, starring Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the Clown. Pennywise is more than just a murdering clown who lurks in the sewers, he’s a being from beyond time and space who feeds on the negative emotions of children. The trailer scared me, so I can’t imagine being in the same room as him. Via Bloody-Disgusting:
“At one point, they set up this entire scene, and these kids come in, and none of them have seen me yet,” Skarsgard remembered. “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. Some of them were really intrigued, but some couldn’t look at me, and some were shaking.”
“This one kid started crying,” he continued. “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.”
That’s horrifying… but also a little awesome. If people were worried that the movie wasn’t going to be scary enough, I’m pretty convinced by that. I mean, I don’t want to cry in public, so I’ll probably wait until the movie hits Netflix, but if I want to scare the crap out of myself, I know what to watch.