Welcome to Derry Creators Explain Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise Reveal

Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise finally shows his face halfway through It: Welcome to Derry season 1.

It: Welcome to Derry’s fifth episode titled, “29 Neibolt Street” delivers a major surprise. Matty Clements (Miles Ekhardt), who both the audience and characters in the show believed to be dead, randomly appears in the Losers’ Club’s hideout. Apparently, he somehow survived his encounter with Pennywise in the debut episode.

Obviously, this was a trap. The terrifying clown pulled one over on the children he is currently stalking and terrorizing. Then, in an eerily familiar scene, “Matty” lures them to the sewer. And, in the blink of an eye, the adorable little boy turns into Skarsgård’s iconic iteration of the character, revealing what is, to many, his most terrifying form.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the creators and showrunners of It: Welcome to Derry, Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs, discuss the highly anticipated reveal and why they chose to wait so long for it. Barbara explained that they stalled it to build suspense so it would be all the more scary when it actually happened. She compared it to Jaws, where part of the anxiety the characters and audience have is because they can’t see the creature that is endangering them.

We decided that, in this season, Pennywise should be a little bit like the shark in Jaws. You really want to be strategic. In both movies, it was very important for us to keep the mystery and the fear for this character alive. We find that familiarity is the enemy of that. So it was important for us to delay the pleasure, or the terror, as much as we could.

Andy said that for him, it was “a game of anticipation.” He wanted to keep the viewers on their toes, he wanted them to be desperate to see Skarsgård’s Pennywise. The creator said the goal was to “get people in that state of, ‘I need to see the clown! Where is it?!’ That’s what we would’ve liked as an audience. It’s a bit of a slow burn.”

Fuchs, who originally teamed up with his colleagues as a co-producer and script reviser on It: Chapter Two, says the most compelling thing about the creature is its ability to take on different forms. He adds that this approach also plays into audience expectations. After two films featuring the film’s version of the creature, viewers were naturally anticipating when or if that iteration would surface again.

In the movies, there’s only so much space to see those non-Pennywise manifestations of that creature,” he says. “Because you’re in TV…you get full episodes where you get to explore the other ways It is gonna torment these kids.

Fuchs explained how planning the reveal was very tricky and took quite a while for the three of them to work something out. And, now that Skarsgård has shown his face, the co-creator said that fans can expect to see him do all sorts of things that the clown has never done before in any adaptation of the Stephen King novel.

We went back and forth. We always knew this was not gonna be front and center in the first scene of the pilot in the way that It 1 opens with the introduction to Georgie and Pennywise. But a huge part of the creative process was, ‘When do we introduce this character in the context of this story?’ It really was a function, ultimately, of the story and the characters dictating it.

[Skarsgård] has opportunities with this character that the story of the films did not present. Not only are you getting a really, hopefully, thrilling build-up to seeing Pennywise, you are also gonna see Bill doing things you’ve not seen him do in this character yet.

It: Welcome to Derry releases new episodes every Sunday at 9:00 PM ET and 6:00 PM PT on HBO.