Can Tilda Swinton do anything? A lot of people certainly seem to think so. Fresh off of her appearance as an old Asian man in Doctor Strange, the producers of It wanted Swinton to play Pennywise, the killer clown.
Swinton may have actually been a good choice to play Pennywise. She’s a great actor who can tackle pretty much any role, and like Pennywise, she’s an extra-dimensional spider demon disguised as a clown who feasts on the flesh of human children.
This juicy bit of behind the scenes gossip was actually revealed as a joke. At a press event, director Andrés Muschietti and his sister, producer Barbara Muschietti, were explaining the lengths they went to find an actor to play Pennywise, one of the reporters asked if they had considered Tilda Swinton. Barbara revealed that they had, in fact, inquired about Swinton’s availability.
But alas, because we can’t have nice things, Swinton wasn’t available during the film’s production window, so we’ll just have to live with Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise when It hits theaters on September 8th, even though we’ll always think of what could have been. You can catch Tilda Swindon in pretty much every other movie in some capacity, and painted on a truck in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix.