Bill Skarsgard Reveals He Made Children Cry On The Set Of ‘It’

Thanks to sound design, cinematography, and editing, horror films can craft the perfect scare to terrify their audiences, but during a recent interview, Bill Skarsgård revealed that he managed to terrify children with his mere presence on the set of the upcoming It adaptation.

When being interviewed by his brother Alexander for Interview Magazine, he was asked what it was like knowing that his performance would be playing such a terrifying presence in the film. Bill explained, “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.’”

He added, “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.”

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Considering clowns are supposed to be a goofy presence, it sounds like some of his co-stars didn’t entirely know what to make of the character, while others reacted the way he intended.

The actor noted, “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 sh*t. What am I doing? What is this? This is horrible.’”

Once the cameras stop rolling, however, the actor tried to make amends with his co-stars, explaining, “But then we cut, and obviously I was all, ‘Hey, I’m sorry. This is pretend.’”

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The 26-year-old has a long history with Pennywise, going all the way back to his childhood.

“I remember It being the scariest thing that existed for a kid,” Skarsgård recalled. “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.”

The first installment in the two-part It adaptation lands in theaters September 8.