Bill Skarsgard Laments the Removal of a Particularly Terrifying ‘It’ Flashback
If there’s one bone I can pick about the most recent adaptation of Stephen King’s It, it’s that the movie doesn’t spend enough time with Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Sure, we get that incredible opening sequence where he lures Georgie to his death, but people are right to call Bill Skarsgard’s character one of the most iconic horror characters in decades: he’s fantastically creepy and desperately in need of a lot more screen time. And now, with Andy Muschietti working on a director’s cut for the home video release, we might have one of the first scenes we’d like to see added back in.
In a recent appearance on Variety’s podcast (via Heroic Hollywood), Skarsgard admitted that Muschietti was forced to cut one particularly creepy flashback sequence showing Pennywise before he was the Dancing Clown we all know and love. Here’s how Skarsgard described the sequence:
There was a scene we shot that was a flashback from the 1600s, before Pennywise [was Pennywise]. The scene turned out really, really disturbing. And I’m not the clown. I look more like myself. It’s very disturbing, and sort of a backstory for what It is, or where Pennywise came from. That might be something worth exploring in the second one. The idea is the It entity was dormant for thousands and thousands of years. The [flashback] scene hints on that.
Skarsgard did admit in the interview that the footage could find its way into It: Chapter Two, meaning that the clown’s terrifying origins might be further explored by the adult versions of these characters. That would make sense; kids want to beat the monster, adults want to understand the monster, so odds are good that the adult Losers’ Club would do a lot more digging into the clown’s, ah, unearthly past. Still, there’s no such thing as too many scenes with Skarsgard’s Pennywise, so why not throw it onto the director’s cut release and film a bunch of cool additional footage for Chapter Two? Win-win in my book.