IT's Skarsgard on First Time He Saw Himself as Pennywise

"It was just such an amazing character to play around with."

By Jim Vejvoda

Actor Bill Skarsgard himself may have been kept  hidden during the promotional campaign for Stephen King's IT, but now the man who plays Pennywise has revealed the process of how he helped bring the otherworldly villain to life on the big screen.

You might think that with such a visually arresting character as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, an actor might build their performance from the outside in, but in Skarsgard's case it was more the opposite since the final look of Pennywise still hadn't been determined at the time he was landing the highly coveted role.

"I sort of started inside out, I guess," Skarsgard told me during a recent phone interview. "Even after the auditioning process, the character was still very abstract to me. I came up with ideas of how the character could be and who he could be and how he could work and how he could talk and how he could move around, but I didn’t really have a sense of what he looked like until way further on in the process. Because the makeup wasn’t done, the ideas for the prosthetics weren’t done."

Once he was booked for the role, Skarsgard threw himself into the source material, reading King's book, taking notes and intellectualizing the character. The final step in his embodiment of Pennywise, Skarsgard recalled, was "seeing what the makeup looked on my face for the first time. That was sort of a huge deal, for me to just, for the first time, see what he looked like."

Skarsgard admitted to having a "complicated" reaction the first time he saw himself in the makeup. "It takes a while to get used to. Because, like I said, it was so abstract going into it," he said. "Once I got the makeup on, I sort of had to get used to it, and see how my face moved and how my expressions, what they looked like."

"It was a very unique experience, how abstract the whole process was, because there were so many external variables," he explained. "How the costume felt, and how the costume looked, and that would change his movement to a degree. It was fun. You know, I really enjoyed the whole process of it."

The actor credits IT director Andy Muschietti and the images he personally drew with helping him find the right facial expressions for Pennywise. "We figured out what faces to make, what face meant what," Skarsgard said, explaining that they developed a shorthand for which expressions worked best as they were shooting. "We had our own language where he could just shout out an expression that I knew exactly what he meant. You know, like, gooey face, or, you know, lower your chin, or whatever it could be. Or, multiverse look, or whatever. We had kind of our own language to figure out what worked best and what worked good for when."

Stephen King's IT: Pennywise and the actor who plays It, Bill Skarsgard.

Perfecting the look was only one key ingredient for cooking up his version of Pennywise; Skarsgard also set out to find the right voice and laugh for the killer clown. "The voice was really tricky," Skarsgard admitted. "Andy and I would rehearse, and I sort of tried, I think, pretty much every type of voice that you could possibly think of, at least by myself, you know, and playing around with higher pitched or lower pitched, and all these different sort of techniques for using that."

Skarsgard said it was important for the voice to be representative of what Pennywise is, settling on one with "a crackly unpredictability and sort of a creepy aggression" to it. That approach also extended to finding the right laugh for this most unfunny of clowns.

"I wanted a laugh that doesn’t necessarily sound like a laugh. It’s almost like a panic attack as much as it is a laugh. And I found it really, really unsettling myself," Skarsgard said, explaining that wanted a laugh that sounded like someone either hysterically laughing or crying. "I think that something in there between of that hysteria, something really unsettling and awkward appears. And the key for the character for me was that he’s unpredictable and unsettling. That’s something that’s very off with him."

Yep, that's one way to describe Pennywise, ancient force of evil and killer of so many residents of Derry, Maine.

For Bill Skarsgard, finding and embodying the character of Pennywise in Stephen King's IT was a singular experience in his career: "I never done anything like this before, you know. It was just such an amazing character to play around with."

For more of IGN's converage of Stephen King's IT, read our review, listen to the latest episode of the IGN Movies Podcast for our full spoiler discussion about the film, get a rundown of all the box office records IT broke its opening weekend, check out our explainer piece on IT's ending and how it sets up the sequel, and then find out everything we know about IT: Chapter Two so far.

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