One of the great pleasures I’ve had during my tenure at CinemaBlend has been covering the full scope of the modern IT adaptations. Back in 2017, I remember asking Finn Wolfhard, Chosen Jacobs, Wyatt Oleff, Jaeden Martell, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, and Jack Dylan Grazer about who they wanted to play their adult counterparts in the sequel, and in 2019, I asked those same stars about potentially being part of a 2044 remake of IT: Chapter 2. And late last year, I got to talk to the main cast of IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1, and I got into the weeds about the future of the show with co-showrunner Jason Fuchs.
In the last decade, the only key figure involved with the franchise I never spoke to was Pennywise himself, Bill Skårsgard – but that changed earlier this week.
I spoke with the actor on Monday during a virtual press day for his new movie Dead Man’s Wire, and I made a point of using part of my time to discuss his work on IT: Welcome To Derry. His commentary is the core of this week’s edition of The King Beat, as he discussed his whole new way to look at his most beloved character.
After IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1, Bill Skarsgård Talks Wrapping His Mind Around Pennywise In A Whole New Way
SPOILER WARNING: Before we go any further, know that there are major spoilers for IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1 dead ahead. If you have not yet caught up with the show, use your HBO Max subscription to do so and then get back here!
When it came to reprising his role as Pennywise in IT: Welcome To Derry, Bill Skarsgård was particularly drawn to the project by one key element: the tale of Bob Gray. While the titular IT has existed on Earth for eons, the HBO series offered the actor the opportunity to explore the story behind how the entity took on his dancing clown persona.
Now, of course, that story has been told… but thanks to the show’s Season 1 finale, there’s a whole new special angle to explore: the fascinating way that IT perceives time, and the fact that its consciousness will be be running opposite the reverse chronological plans for yet-to-be-confirmed future seasons (the principal setting shifting from 1962 to 1935 to 1908).
As captured in the video above, I asked Bill Skarsgård about the Welcome To Derry revelation, and he smiled as he discussed his conversations about it with co-creator/producer/director Andy Muschietti – acknowledging the absolute wildness of the character as originally defined by the mind of Stephen King. He began,
I was speaking to Andy, and he was kind of telling me the sort of arc of the show, and then I was like, 'Alright, ok, so what's...' – what I speak about is like what's the Pennywise thing and the IT thing of it all. And I mean, it's so, so abstract, this transdimensional evil being thing with a spider and a turtle or whatever. It is really out there.
If you’ve read IT, you know precisely what he’s talking about. King’s writing is typically very clear and illustrative (King's first editor Bill Thompson liked to say he “has a movie projector in his head”), but there are certain sequences in the epic 1986 novel that challenge the imagination to keep up with its strangest ideas. Thus far, the adaptations have really only skimmed the origins of the titular monster, involving the Macroverse and his great battle with Maturin the turtle.
Continuing, Skarsgård noted that when it comes to the adaptation’s interpretation of the character, all bets are pretty much off, referencing that even Stephen King isn’t really a perfect source for an absolute truth due to the substance abuse issues that the author was dealing with at the time the novel was spilling out of his brain:
I mean, reading the book, as you know, I mean, you can interpret it in a thousand different ways, and I'm pretty sure that Stephen King doesn't really know. I mean there's rumors that he doesn't remember writing much of it because he was, you know, in a stimulated mind during it (laugh).
The big revelation in discussion here is featured in the IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1 finale after Pennywise successfully manages to isolate Marge Truman (Matilda Lawler) from her friends. The blood-covered clown tells the terrified girl that she will one day become Margaret Tozier and have a boy named Richie who will contribute to its death… or is it its birth? In that moment, we understand that the transdimensional evil doesn’t experience time like a human being.
Skarsgård was hesitant about getting too deep into spoilers from his conversations with Muschietti, not wanting to ruin anything that may potentially come in the future of the show, but how Pennywise perceives time was apparently a notable part of their conversation:
There is this transdimensional thing, and it was just something that I talked to... I'm like, like, 'How do you...' I don't know how much I'm spoiling now, but I was just like, 'We're going back in time, but what's time to something that is not part of this dimension?' I'm not gonna spoil, but I thought that was an interesting thing, that the character is kind of going in two directions. So that's kind of where that came from.
While the collaboration conjured the idea of Pennywise’s unique temporal perspective, Bill Skarsgård gave full credit to Andy Muschietti for the idea of having the evil clown unfurl a Richie Tozier missing person flyer as a callback to IT: Chapter One. He added,
We just really explored it in that one scene where he is like that kind of, 'Time is confusing to little Pennywise' moment. And then Andy decided like to really hit that on its head with the Richie Tozier [missing person flyer] – like, he brings up that thing. So it's like an homage, it's just call out to the fans of the movies. But it's just quite interesting. The show is not about any of that. You know, there's a whole season about... which is the whole story that Pennywise isn't that much involved in, so just kind of this like little bookend thing, how we ended it.
As for where things go from here, that answer is complicated – and that’s even putting aside the fact that fans are still awaiting official news of an IT: Welcome To Derry renewal. In one of the final scenes of Season 1, Marge discusses Pennywise’s comments with Clara Stack’s Lilly Bainbridge and wonders if the shapeshifter could be targeting the family trees of the group we know as The Losers Club, potentially changing its fate in the process. Could that be what’s in store as the focus shifts to 1935 for Season 2 and the show ultimately adapts the infamous Bradley Gang massacre?
Bill Skarsgård doesn’t have the answers as of yet, but he made it clear that he is intrigued by this new direction for his iconic horror villain and the specialness of him being more in sync with the television audience than the citizens of Derry whom it is terrorizing. He concluded,
I'm not sure where we're going with it. But you know, there's something fun to explore that Pennywise might be going backwards, but it's forward for him just as it is for the audience. We have to go and wait, you know, two years for each season or whatever. (laugh).
That last bit is perhaps the most frustrating thing about a delayed announcement for the future of IT: Welcome To Derry (be it a single season renewal or the greenlight to fully execute the three-season plan). The longer we wait for a Season 2 to be made official, the longer we have to wait for wheels to roll into motion and for new episodes to start getting made. As suggested by Skarsgård, it feels unlikely that we’ll see a new run before 2027, and demonstrating patience is going to be rough.
For now, fans will have to settle for satiating themselves with the material we have: Stephen King’s novel and the adaptations IT: Chapter One, IT: Chapter Two and IT: Welcome To Derry Season 1. All three of the latter are currently streaming on HBO Max, and while only the movies are now available in physical media formats, the series will be getting a 4K UHD and Blu-ray release this spring.
That wraps up this week’s very special edition of The King Beat, but this column’s 2026 run is only just beginning. As always, I’ll be back here on CinemaBlend next week with a new feature exploring new developments in the world of Stephen King (perpetually keeping fingers crossed for a Welcome To Derry renewal) – but for those of you looking for something to read in the meantime can explore the full history of the author’s adaptations with my series Adapting Stephen King.
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