The supernatural horrors at Derry didn’t begin with the disappearance of a young boy down a storm drain on a rainy night in 1988. In fact, as we learn in the two movies based on the Stephen King novel, this is a recurring inescapable nightmare that haunts the children of the small town time and time again.
If you tell the same story about a terrifying clown eating kids to the same audience, however, the novelty begins to wear off at some point. But this was a risk that directors Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti willingly took when they decided to produce a prequel series to explore the origin of Pennywise and how he terrorized Derry nearly 30 years prior to the events of “IT: Chapter One.”
“IT: Welcome to Derry” follows a group of high schoolers who attempt to uncover the mystery behind the disappearance of a boy after experiencing strange hauntings. Meanwhile, two Air Force members and Korean War veterans arrive at the Derry Air Force Base, where a general works on a secret project that aims to locate a fear-inducing “weapon” to aid in the Cold War effort.
The prequel was developed by the Muschietti siblings and Jason Fuchs, all of whom were involved in the “IT” films. In an exclusive interview with the Muschietti siblings, they talked about having been given so much trust with the world of “IT” and the freedom of expanding the story of Pennywise beyond what had been written by its original creator King.
“There was no pressure in expanding this because, as we said before, the source [material] is like an endless bit of question marks. So we never felt at any point that we were expanding on something that was complete,” said Andy Muschietti. “If you go into the book, you will notice that some of the stories are resolved, but most of them are just a puzzle that has not been completed.”
On collaborating with King, he shared, “Our relationship with Stephen King has been increasingly close since we made the first movie. I think he was very generous and encouraging for us to dig into his work and also be adventurous and not stick to the book as an ironclad blueprint. From the beginning for the series, we were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to shed light on things that are not in the book. We’re going to shed light on question marks that are not answered. So we’re going to create. We’re going to invent things.’ I think he was game from the beginning, and he was excited to see what we brought to the table and what were the pieces of the puzzle that we were like, we’re going to put on that table and we tried to complete.”
In a separate interview, showrunners Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane talked about the exact moment while working on the series that made them realize that what they had was something brilliant that fans and audiences, both old and new, are going to love that’s so different from what they probably would have expected after the two movies.
“I think the moment I felt like we were onto something cool and interesting that felt fresh was when we finished the pilot,” explained Jason. “I had written a draft of the pilot, I came in and developed it with Andy and Barbara, then Brad and I started working not just on the season, but on how the story of the season would impact what happens in the pilot. There’s a moment in the pilot towards the end that is pretty shocking [that] Brad had pitched it to me in the room. The minute he said that, I thought, ‘Oh, this is so unexpected and so fresh that wherever the story, wherever the season goes from here, I know we’re doing something new and interesting that I’m excited about.'”
As for Brad, it was knowing that there was so much potential to tell a fresh story in a totally new setting that convinced him that the show was going to make its mark as a must-watch in one way or another. “For me, I realized that we would be able to put a lot of there there, so to speak, in the story when I realized that we’re doing an “IT” story, which is about an entity exploiting children’s fears to divide and conquer them, and we’re doing that story in 1962 America,” he said. “A lot of things became very obvious, and I realized the deeper we delve into those themes, the more interesting the show will be for me and hopefully for audiences. Obviously, we have to find really personal, really visceral, really good scares to salt up the meat of those kids for It to eat. But the setting of the show enabled us to take what’s inherent about the entity in the book and make it super relevant.”
“IT: Welcome to Derry” stars a large cast of characters, including children and adults, who each deal with their own problems and nightmares. Among the adults are Taylour Paige and Jovan Adepo, who play Leroy and Charlotte Hanlon, a couple who move to Derry with their son, Will, unaware of the terrors that await them from supernatural entities and real-life racism. When asked about their experience getting to work with the kids on set both in front of and behind the camera, the two gave nothing but praise.
“Those are the most dedicated children, child actors that I’ve seen,” said Jovan. “I think [when] all of them came in, I felt like they were like little adults, the way they handled approaching each scene and taking it seriously and wanting to come in and being prepared. I think [the actor who played] our son, specifically, Blake—incredible focus for his age and wanting to do his character justice and do it well and to really create a full scene with his scene partners who have been acting much longer than him. They’re very special kids.”
“I felt like I just wanted to protect them,” added Taylour. “They haven’t quite been conditioned yet in society. They’re still very much instinct-based and having fun and it’s play. I had special moments with a lot of them where I just thought about… I just wanted to be who I needed when I was their age, essentially.”
When discussing their own characters, Taylour and Jovan opened up about certain aspects from their personal lives that they leaned on to better understand and grasp the people they’re portraying.
“I think it’s going back to my familiarity of being a military brat and having a father that was always the way because he had to work,” Jovan shared. “He works overseas. And him just doing the best for his family, doing the best for us, was something that I leaned heavily on. And it helped me a lot in portraying someone who is completely structured and [had a] high moral compass and [was] very disciplined in how he likes to live his day-to-day life.”
“For me, I represent a very specific woman, but I think a lot of women have felt like they’re doing what they have to do,” said Taylour. “It’s obligation. It is love, but you have a sense that maybe you’re born in the wrong era because you want to contribute more to society or because you think that if you had the right venue or the right position, you could maybe help get things done or stop things. Just that blessed unrest that comes with, I think, being a woman in general, being a mother, being a wife, and what you had to swallow in 1962. I relate to that. I’ve felt insane before. I felt insane because I feel like I knew something and my outer world reflects something else, and I had kind of to agree, even though I didn’t agree. That can create a big dissonance or can propagate a lack of self-trust. And that’s scary.”
Kimberly Guerrero and James Remar, who play former childhood sweethearts Rose and General Francis Shaw respectively, likewise reflected on how they could relate to their characters on a deeply personal level.
“I’ve been playing tough guys and scary guys and heartless guys a lot in my career. Those are the roles that people seem to remember. But I’m personally a very romantic guy,” shared James. “The early scenes between Rose and Francis Shaw when they were kids is what made me very, very excited and attached to this role. Because this guy is a three-star general. He’s got a ramrod back, and he’s commanded men into death. He’s fearless, square-jawed and tough. But then he’s got a backstory where he was in love with a little native girl, and he was a white boy, and they just spent this summer together after this terrible, terrible incident with this horrible creature. I said, ‘This is something that I really, really, really want to play.’ It’s a very full character. It’s not just some dude in a uniform. It’s a guy with a heart, even though it’s been buried by 50 years of absence.”
“For me, I have also been niched into playing Native American characters, which I love and I honor,” Kimberly then added. “It’s such a gift to get to play different Indigenous folks from different tribes and do my history, do the deep dives into each culture so that I can honor each people, past, present, and future. And so it was really great to get to play this part of America’s history, which is kind of at the ground zero of where colonization began. You don’t see a lot of the tribes from the Northeast represented. It was immediately, for me as a historian and as an Indigenous person, exciting to go dive in deeper into Penobscot history. Then I love also the agency that Rose has as a woman and the power that she has even as a business owner in downtown Derry. And so there was a lot of really empowering themes that I immediately gravitated toward. And lastly, I’m a huge protector. I am a warrior when it comes to protecting the people that I love. And so that was something that personally I knew I could bring to this character and get grounded into the honoring the people that actually this story would belong to. So the combination of my inner warrior with this adventure of going into stopping this great evil and how it’s affected this land, it was just a pure hook from the beginning.”
“IT: Welcome to Derry” is currently streaming on HBO Max.
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