The first IT was a massive horror movie hit and made pretty much everybody afraid of clowns. Pennywise, as played by Bill Skarsgard, was a truly disturbing creation and anybody would completely understand why a bunch of kids would be terrified of him. However, while filming IT Chapter 2, it seems that Pennywise was quite capable of freaking out a bunch of adults., as James McAvoy recently admitted that the clown really got to him on the set. According to McAvoy...
He's amazing. The guy who plays the clown in terrifying. He's a lovely guy, and yet he really freaked me out. I remember standing there with the rest of the cast, all these adults, and we'd all done weird, freaky stuff. And we are all looking at each other going, 'I don't like being here. I don't like being an actor today.' He really did, he really freaked me out. I never liked clowns as a kid.
It shows you just how unnerving Pennywise is in person when the actors themselves feel off being around the character. As James McAvoy told GMA, it's not like he and the other actors in the film hadn't made films with weird or disturbing things in them, but there was something especially wrong while filming IT Chapter 2. Although, McAvoy admits he's never liked clowns, so that may be part of the problem.
The general fear of clowns that so many people seems to have was certainly something that came up when the first IT film was released. It became such a thing that professional clowns actually got upset over the way they were being portrayed. Stephen King himself understood the anger, though he didn't feel bad about it, because clowns are scary and this is just fact.
James McAvoy will be playing the adult Bill Denbrough, the defacto leader of the Loser's Club from the first movie. He'll be joined by Jessica Chastain as Beverly, Isaiah Mustafa as Mike, Jay Ryan as Ben, Bill Hader as Ritchie, Jay Ransone as Eddie, and Andy Bean as Stan. However, we haven't seen the last of the young actors who played the roles in the first film, as the entire group will reportedly be back, one assumes in flashbacks or some sort of prologue.
IT set box office records when it was released in 2017, making over $300 million domestically and over $700 million worldwide. While the plan was always to make Stephen King's magnum opus IT as two films, the second part wasn't officially greenlit until the first movie was released. When it was, the green light couldn't come fast enough.
Get ready to be scared by clowns all over again. IT Chapter 2 will be in September, but we can expect the return of Pennywise in a trailer long before that.
