It: Welcome to Derry Creators and Cast Tease Pennywise’s Return

“The pressure that Barbara and Andy, and now HBO, have signed up for is immense,” admits actor Chris Chalk ahead of the premiere of his new series, It: Welcome to Derry. “They made over a billion dollars, so now you have to make something good.”

“They” refers to brother-sister filmmaking duo Andy and Barbara Muschietti, whose landmark movie duology, an adaption of Stephen King’s It, generated huge box office revenue alongside enough Pennywise the Dancing Clown merchandise to shake a red balloon at. Even with those two films encompassing over 300 minutes of screentime, there was still more material to mine from King’s lengthy tome. Hence, the upcoming eight-part HBO prequel series, It: Welcome to Derry, which follows a flurry of new (and familiar) characters as they navigate an already turbulent 1962 setting with the added hiccup of evil entity Pennywise stalking the title town. The show feels just as cinematic (and gory) as the hit films… as it should, since Andy Muschietti himself directed multiple episodes, including the pilot. 

“They did the films and felt very close to the material, as did [showrunners] Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane,” explains series lead Jovan Adepo. “They care for the IP and for the universe of It and Derry, but they weren’t ever too precious. As long as we weren’t trying to pull something out of a hat that makes no sense being in the IP, for the most part, they were like, ‘That fucking rocks. Try it. Let’s go for it.’”

Adepo (Babylon) plays Leroy Hanlon, a career military officer who is also the eventual grandfather of Losers Club member Mike Hanlon, while Taylour Paige (Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F) plays his concerned wife Charlotte. Chris Chalk (Gotham) takes on the role of Dick Hallorann from King’s parallel novel The Shining, who is also featured in It. All three thespians, who share the screen with an equally talented group of child actors, have to navigate a complex, multi-narrative of mysterious goings-on in the town of Derry—including murders and top-secret military ops—that all point back to Pennywise.

“What I like about Stephen King’s work is there are so many different communities experiencing the same thing, which allows so many different points of entry,” says Chalk. “This show is a side note but really shines because there are 12 different kinds of people here, and 12 ways to experience this entity that you hadn’t seen in the previous two versions.”

Adapting the King Again

The cast is deeply reverential to the source material. Paige refers to its author as “one of the greatest minds of all time,” while Adepo had already appeared as protagonist Larry Underwood in the 2020 miniseries version of King’s The Stand. 

“Both experiences were really great ones,” Adepo says. “Both filmed in Canada, the first one being in Vancouver. I had a blast filming in Vancouver, such a lovely city, and the same for Toronto… my first time in that part of Canada.”

For the Muschetti siblings, it was a bit of a homecoming in more ways than one, since they were returning to the same Toronto locales where they shot the two It movies, including the town of Port Hope, which doubles for the ominous Derry once again.

“They loved us because we bought a lot of muffins and coffee there,” says Barbara. “We had a lot of hotel rooms there. The day after the show opens, we’re gonna go to the Capitol Theatre and show them the first episode.”

In 2016, this author got to visit the set of the first It movie, while Sophia Lillis, as Beverly, dangled from wires in the dank sewer set built at Pinewood Toronto. Barbara said at the time that their first Pennywise movie “winks to the ’50s fears but is a little less naïve.” After all, that version of King’s book was reset to the ‘80s. By contrast, the original book took place in 1958. So a certain cultural naivete became one of the key elements the filmmakers sought to reincorporate into the early 1960s setting of the show.

“The thing that connects me a lot with this era is it’s 1958 when the Losers are kids,” Andy says. “In many ways, this season is more similar to the experience of the kids in the book than the film was. Stephen King was a kid in that era, so it’s not a coincidence that the book is filled with his own personal experiences growing up. 

“People were scared of different things. In the ‘60s, we were closer to ‘50s B-movies about radioactive monsters. Pretty understandable, being in the middle of the Cold War. People were terrified of a nuclear attack, and kids were subjected to all these atomic bomb drills. There’s a character in the show, Bert the Turtle, who is a real mascot created around those times to be a friendly figure in this warning PSA for schools.”

While the new show is built out from interstitial material from the original 1986 It, these extrapolations are also pulled from the Civil Rights era itself. A palpable racial tension is a constant for the three Black leads in early episodes, a horror on top of the other horror happening beneath the town’s surface. This includes the local Black projectionist at the movie theater having several gruesome murders falsely pinned on him.

“There’s zero naivete in this show in terms of the intensity of the experiences that the characters go through,” Andy insists. “Among all the complexities of social and political stuff in the ‘50s, it was a simpler life… for some people. But it’s not toned down. It’s actually more gruesome than any of the movies. Because we have more screen time, we could explore more characters, more fears, and different scares.”

Adepo believes that, no matter how outlandish the entity’s supernatural antics get, it is important that they ground the setting in realism.  

“Everything else is how it should have been in the ‘60s,” Adepo elaborates. “If we were doing this and pretending that racism didn’t exist in the ‘60s, that would turn into a stylized type of thing. That’s just not what we’re building. I don’t think Stephen King ever shied away from what was real.”

Shining On

“The fun thing about dealing with race and terror is racism is terror,” says Chalk, whose Hallorann uses his psychic talents as a workaround to racial confrontations. “What happens when an entity that doesn’t care about anything other than your fleshy parts comes into the equation?”

Adds Andy, “There are a lot of scares that are related to things that were happening culturally and socially in America, and segregation is one of them. And racism. It’s all true to the book. We’re not inventing anything, we’re just expanding it and throwing light on certain events and behaviors.”

Leroy is determined to shield his family from unpleasantness when he moves them from Louisiana to Derry, where his new assignment is. Unfortunately, racism rears its head immediately when he arrives at the base and is confronted by a bigoted white soldier. He deliberately internalizes all of this. 

Says Paige, “Leroy is trying to take care of his family, but it has put a lot of strain on us, moving a lot. It’s put a strain on him being able to connect emotionally to his son, because there’s a lot of rigidity in his character. Jovan actually comes from a military family.”

Not only does Adepo hail from a military background, but he has also portrayed soldierly characters in films like Fences and Overlord.

“There’s this element of military men being structured, which is something that I can relate to because my father was in the military, and that’s definitely how he kept his household,” he says. “I’ve played that type of character quite a few times. For this character, it was important for him to put that part of his life in a safe package so it doesn’t seep all the way into his more domesticated life.”

“There’s so much pressure on men to perform, to provide,” Paige notes. “And then you’re talking 1962, right? He’s African American. He’s representing our country. Everything is survival. Your marriage gets put in the hierarchy of needs, and the hierarchy of what you have to present when you go in there every day. Charlotte feels the brunt of that. Charlotte has this intuition that something’s off.”

As for Chalk, stepping into the shoes of previous actors who portrayed Dick Hallorann was a big deal. Those who embodied the elder version of the psychic character who came to Danny Torrance’s aid include Scatman Crothers (The Shining), Melvin Van Peebles (The Shining TV miniseries), and Carl Lumbly in the more recent Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep. Chalk’s younger iteration may surprise fans with his swagger, along with how deftly he uses his shine to navigate a hostile world.

“They’ll be surprised about quite a bit, because there’s an age gap between the Doctor Sleep and The Shining version versus this version,” Chalk explains of embodying Hallorann. “That’s the freedom of being able to play him so much younger, at an early stage of his shining, while still honoring Scatman and the legacy that Stephen King established. I tend to play people at younger stages of their life, like Gotham… and playing Lucius Fox, and having Morgan Freeman. I study a little bit, then do my own thing.”

An early episode features Hallorann and two other enlisted men getting kicked out of a local dive, which foreshadows an important Pennywise-centric event from the original book involving a Black-owned bar in Derry known as the Black Spot. Muschietti tried unsuccessfully to incorporate this scene in both It movies.

“That scene is basically the cause and effect of the Black Spot,” Andy reveals. “It’s the seed for why these colored airmen have to find a place of their own. Dick is working for the military in a very specific secret mission, and he asks them something in return for his fellows.”

“For Black officers who are serving their country, to be displaced by townies is part of the additional terror,” says Chalk. “Everybody’s being terrorized, then the real monster comes. It does lead us to find a place to go that can be just ours, where we can feel safe, which, on a certain level, is what everybody in Derry has an awareness of. That this entity is looking for them. I do think we did a good job of acknowledging the reality. Without that reality, how can we believe in the clown?”

Return of the Clown

Speaking of the clown, actor/executive producer Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise (returning from the films) does not appear in his iconic jovial form early on, although the entity certainly makes his presence known in other horrifying ways. 

“It’s not every day that Bill shows up on set,” explains Andy of the new show. “It’s always something very special when Bill appears as Pennywise. You can feel it because he walks on stage, and there’s this atmosphere that is super special. He is imposing. He is Pennywise.”

This evokes my own memories of being creeped out on set in 2016, watching Skarsgård decked out as Pennywise, even when he was simply chatting and laughing with the Muschiettis and drinking a cup of coffee between takes. Does the cast or crew still get weirded out by the character, or is he too much of an icon now? 

“I think people do… I still do,” Barbara admits. “Especially when he’s standing up. I’m tall, but when he’s standing up, he freaks me out. It’s so funny because we’re generally having a very normal conversation about kids or pizza, and he’s absolutely terrifying. I have to remind him, ‘You are freaking me out, buddy.’ We tried especially in the first movie to keep the kids away from Bill so that their impressions would be on camera, but it didn’t work. They loved hanging out with him.”

While Pennywise will make a full comeback in future episodes, fans can look forward to many other Stephen King references peppered throughout Welcome to Derry, including familiar-looking cans of Calumet Baking Powder from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. 

“You’ll see some callbacks,” confirms Chalk, whose character stocked that Native American-fronted baking powder in the 1980 film. “The Jamie Travis-directed episode really was focused on honoring some visuals with Hallorann from The Shining that we know deep in our souls.”

Explains Andy, “It’s all over the series. For fans of The Shining, the bigger easter egg happens in the last episode. It’s beyond our desire to create easter eggs. When you’re telling a story about Derry in the ‘60s, it’s almost inevitable to connect events and places and people with other stuff from Stephen King. ‘So and so is sent to prison. What is the closest prison to Derry? It’s Shawshank.’ Dodging that would be weird, and it becomes an easter egg… that is always stimulating for the audience.”

While there may be references to The Shining, it’s how Chalk’s Hallorann is using said shine to move his way up the ladder that acts as an intriguing development.

“Dick Hallorann has the longest long game that there is,” says Chalk. “He is a lot of steps ahead of most people. Then there are moments when he’s like, ‘Oh no, whoops.’ His confidence in his long game might be his Achilles heel.”

Adepo and Chalk were friends and colleagues before they were cast together for It: Welcome to Derry, having appeared together in When They See Us, Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series on the Central Park Five.

“We have a very complex arc of a relationship,” Adepo says of Leroy and Dick. “There may or may not be a bit of friction. My character is someone who leads by the book, ‘A plus B equals C,’ and Hallorann can be like, ‘Well, what if we skip the first two, go straight to C and D?’ I’m like, ‘No, that’s not fucking right.’ It makes for a dynamic of friction and fluidity with Chalk.”

While Andy Muschietti is a visual whiz of Spielbergian proportions, as proven in the It films, he also has a sensitivity for performance that his actors appreciate. For one tense scene between Leroy and Dick, Andy convinced his crew to give Adepo and Chalk eight hours of virtual silence so they could really dig into the conflict between the characters.

“I cried so much afterwards,” Chalk says. “Not because of the weight of the scene, but because Jovan and I both felt so held. ‘We’re not just props, we’re real people.’ Andy, to make that adjustment in such an important scene at the last minute, he’ll be in the annals of heroism for me.”

“Andy loves directing, he loves actors, he loves story, he loves Stephen King,” concludes Paige. “If it were up to him, we’d probably shoot 24 hours a day.”

It: Welcome to Derry is scheduled to premiere on HBO on Oct. 26, 2025.