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Bill Skarsgard Reveals He Made Children Cry on the Set of ‘It’

It’s one thing for a horror film to be scary and frightening as a finished product but, it’s a completely different ballgame when the star of a horror film is actually, legitimately scaring people during filming.

Star of the It remake, Bill Skarsgard, recently chatted with his older brother, Alexander for Interview Magazine.  After some hilarious brotherly banter and back and forth chatter about taking out the garbage, sleeping in too late on the weekdays and other such things, the two finally got down to chatting about the highly anticipated upcoming reboot film.

Bill Skarsgard Reveals He Made Children Cry on the Set of 'It'
Entertainment Weekly

The brothers started to talk first about the original made for TV film.  Bill Skarsgard explains, he remembers the original It being the scariest thing, pretty much ever:

“I remember It being the scariest thing that existed for a kid. There were other horror films, like Friday the 13th or Halloween, but this was the really scary one because it was children and a clown. So many people go, “That film really destroyed my childhood,” or, “I hated clowns after that.” Hopefully, there will be a lot of 10-year-olds who will be traumatized forever based on my performance.”

When Alexanders asks Bill, “Does it feel good knowing that kids around the world for decades to come will have nightmares about you?”  Bill reveals that he’s already traumatizing children while shooting the movie!  He tells a story of how a group of children came to set and saw him in full make up and costume for the first time.  Their reactions ranged from  head tilting curiosity to screaming and crying in fear.  Bill said:

“It’s a really weird thing to go, ‘If I succeed at doing what I’m trying to do with this character, I’ll traumatize kids.’ On set, I wasn’t very friendly or goofy. I tried to maintain some sort of weirdness about the character, at least when I was in all the makeup. At one point, they set up this entire scene, and these kids come in, and none of them have seen me yet. Their parents have brought them in, these little extras, right? And then I come out as Pennywise, and these kids—young, normal kids—I saw the reaction that they had. Some of them were really intrigued, but some couldn’t look at me, and some were shaking. This one kid started crying. He started to cry and the director yelled, ‘Action!’ And when they say “action,” I am completely in character. So some of these kids got terrified and started to cry in the middle of the take, and then I realized, ‘Holy shit. What am I doing? What is this? This is horrible.'”

He did follow up the story by saying, the second the director would yell “cut,” he did what he could to comfort the poor kids but, if Skarsgard is that scary in real life, we can’t wait to see what he brings to the big screen!

In addition to Skarsgard, the film also stars Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer, Wyatt Oleff, Chosen Jacobs and Jeremy Ray Taylor and is directed by Andrés Muschietti.

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