‘It’ Star Bill Skarsgård Gives Stephen Colbert a Pennywise Smile Tutorial
Written by SOURCE on September 10, 2019
With It: Chapter Two currently nightmaring up some serious box office dollars at a theater near you, now’s as good a time as any to perfect your take on the lauded smiling tactics of Pennywise.
That’s the exact sort of educational material you’ll find tucked into Bill Skarsgård’s timely Late Show interview, which sees host Stephen Colbert making a commendable attempt at the smirk.
Asked if he had based Pennywise on “anything or anyone,” Skarsgård shouted out previous Pennywise embodier Tim Curry and—compellingly enough—animal documentaries. As for the smile, he noted that his brother Gustaf Skarsgård deserves some credit.
“Obviously, Tim Curry did this iconic performance of Pennywise and we were remaking it and I got to fill these huge clown shoes, and they’re big shoes to fill,” he said on Monday’s show. “And so we were like, ‘OK, how can we make this different?'”
Prior to the 2017 film’s production, Skarsgård had been deep into watching some of those aforementioned animal docs, a practice that ultimately bagged him some inspiration.
“As I was preparing the character, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess he’s a little bit hyena and a little bit grizzly bear,'” he said.
Naturally, this slice of character development insight was followed immediately by a Skarsgård-instructed mini-class on the Pennywise smile at Colbert’s request. See the results of all that up top.
As anyone who’s even tangentially familiar with It creator Stephen King’s work, the long history of bringing his imaginative literary universes to the screen is sprinkled with arguably as many slam dunks as total misses. With 2017’s It, however, director Andy Muschietti and his team pulled off the rare dual feat of giving audiences a piece of work that stands as both a carefully crafted critical darling and a history-making box office performer.
Chapter Two continues that legacy, having garnered mostly positive reviews and a $91 million opening weekend here in the States. That haul was more than good enough to give the movie the distinction of the second largest opening weekend in horror film history, while the top spot is still held by its predecessor.
