Who Was Under the Mask? The Actors Who Played Pennywise in 'It'

For many people, clowns on their own are scary enough. They've never really scared me, but that firefighter clown in Brave Little Toaster certainly did make an impression on my baby self. In more a way like, "Huh. Interesting." Meanwhile, the very idea of him makes my mom shudder.

So take a clown and give him cosmic superpowers to use fear to feed itself for eternity, and you've got a recipe for terror unlike anything else. That's Pennywise from Stephen King's It. And since it's Halloween week, why not revisit this white-faced character hell-bent on capturing kids?

And if you need to check out some other horror behind the scenes, read up on the performers who played Freddy Krueger and Ghostface.

Only two actors have worn Pennywise's greasepaint on screen, but the story of who almost did, and how each one made the clown their own, is a lesson in following an iconic performance without copying it.

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The Original: Tim Curry

For an entire generation of kids, Pennywise had one face, and it belonged to Tim Curry. Curry died at 80 this August. His death sent plenty of fans back to the 1990 miniseries that kept them out of those dang storm drains.

Curry's Pennywise worked because he looked like a normal clown until he didn't. Much of the menace came from his facial expressions and voice, and not from prosthetics, which is what later performances lean more on.

Steve Newton visited Curry on set in 1990 to speak with him for Fangoria. Curry spoke to him during lunch, fully in costume. He said of the character:

"Basically I guess he’s just pure evil, really, and he can also metamorphose into various other forms—mostly into the image that whoever he’s appearing to fears most. Or he can also sort of seductively become other people. At one point he turns into somebody’s dead father, at another point he turns into the girl that the guy’s in love with. And he uh.. we won’t tell you what he turns into at the end. He’ll probably tell you [referring to makeup effects artist Bart Mixon]. But basically he’s completely irredeemable; he’s the kind of chap that’s entirely without charm.

And what’s fun about him is that a clown is traditionally a very cozy, comforting kind of cheery image, and Pennywise is none of these things. I think of him all the time as a smile gone bad—that’s my image for him."

"A smile gone bad" is an incredible way to describe a cosmic child-killing clown. It's a useful character note for any writer or actor building a villain.

Curry said the makeup took about three hours by then, and the team had roughly a day to land on a clown face that real clowns spend years developing.

He also said a more prosthetic version of the look was tested, but it did too much of the work on its own. To him, the scariest thing is the moment a person decides to kill, not the makeup.

"I’m fascinated by movie villains—I enjoyed Lon Chaney. But in some ways I think that horror movies have got a little too far away from the mind. I mean we had a much more prosthetic version of this makeup–which was very scary looking, and beautifully executed–but did too much work by itself. And I personally think that what is the most horrifying is the moment of decision behind somebody’s eyes when they decide to kill somebody, rather than a pint of blood and a pound-and-a-half of latex."

People reports that in his memoir Vagabond, Curry confirmed he already disliked clowns when he took the part, though not as intensely as the legend claims.

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The New Face: Bill Skarsgård

Talk about making a character yours. Bill Skarsgård took on Pennywise for the Warner Bros. feature remake of the novel and made him into something both hilarious and menacing and dangerous in a way Curry's never quite reached.

"Tim Curry's performance was truly great, but it's important for me to do something different because of that," Skarsgård told Entertainment Weekly. "I'll never be able to make a Tim Curry performance as good as Tim Curry."

In 2017, CBC reported that director Andy Muschietti said Skarsgård's version leans closer to King's novel than the 1990 miniseries. This version does use prosthetics to make the clown features more pronounced, as if his head is distended.

In the prequel series Welcome to Derry, Skarsgård plays two roles. He's the clown and Bob Gray, the clown's human alias. Welcome to Derry comes a few years after IT chapters one and two, and he told ScreenRant he was hesitant to return, worried the show wouldn't live up to the movies.

"I feel that, in the end, we explored some parts of Pennywise that we hadn't seen before or hadn't done," he said. "Andy and I always have fun together, and I think that we did those aspects of it. Even with Pennywise's performance, there was like, 'Okay, here's a juicy scene, and you see something else from Pennywise, or more of him.' I had fun with those scenes, for sure."

The clown is far from retired. SYFY Wire reports that showrunner Brad Caleb Kane told Deadline the second season of IT: Welcome to Derry is greenlit and will jump back to Depression-era Derry in 1935, with Muschietti already casting.

The Almost-Pennywise: Will Poulter

Before Skarsgård, the remake had a different clown lined up, and a very young one. GamesRadar reported that Will Poulter had been cast as Pennywise shortly before director Cary Fukunaga exited the project over a dispute with the studio.

Fukunaga had first wanted Ben Mendelsohn, but New Line wanted him to take a big pay cut (per JoBLo).

Variety reported during the upheaval that Poulter had scheduling conflicts that caused him to drop out. Muschietti said later that the material was simply too dark for the actor.

"Will basically expressed a feeling that he had slowly disengaged from playing that character, that was so dark and terrifying," he told Deadline. "It was a personal decision I respected, but I was eager and willing to find my own Pennywise and that's what we did."

Which Pennywise is your favorite?