home in the wake of another tragedy, old memories
come to haunt them—some more literally than others.
“As an actor, you often put on a backstory you never
[see] on screen,” McAvoy says. With IT, he felt an “over-
helming sentimentality” as his own recollections
blurred with Bill’s. “I’ve got these memories of my char-
acter as a young boy [from the first film],” he says,
emphasizing his connection with the role.
McAvoy was Muschietti’s first choice to play Bill in the
sequel, both because the director is a longtime fan and
the actor looks like an adult version of Martell. Jessica
Chastain, who plays the grown-up Beverly in IT Chapter
Two, was a matchmaker of sorts, revealing Muschietti’s
admiration when she and McAvoy were working together
on the set of Simon Kinberg ’s X-Men film, Dark Phoenix.
(Muschietti was her director on 2013’s Mama.)
Being a major King fan, McAvoy squealed internally.
“You hear things like that a lot in your career from vari-
ous different people, and it doesn’t always necessarily
come through,” he says. “A very wise actor once told me,
‘Don’t believe you’ve got the job until you see yourself on
screen at the premiere.’ ” A few months later, McAvoy
finally got the official call.
“I think that he’s so committed to the character, to the
story, and something that I cannot value enough, which
is his talent,” says Muschietti, who also calls McAvoy “a
real trouper” when it comes to the physical stunt work—
the star strained his quads and developed tendinitis in
his knees from shooting multiple takes of a grueling
sequence in the third act. (McAvoy’s fine now, as the
actor repeated more than once on social media and to
Conan O’Brien on his show.)
In another demanding scene, a departure from King ’s
book, Bill chases a little boy around the same age as
Georgie through a carnival’s hall of mirrors to try and
save him from Pennywise. The entire sequence was shot
with virtually no computer effects (Muschietti says
you’ll know the small bit of CGI when you see it) and
two cameras rolling simultaneously. It’s a moment that
emerged over drinks—tequila, to be exact—between the
actor and director.
“We were missing a vital story beat for Bill where he
dealt with his guilt that he caused his brother’s death,”
McAvoy recalls. “I said to Andy, ‘What can we do?’...and
literally in 50 minutes he invented a whole new
sequence. It was never in the script, and it isn’t in the
book. It’s brilliant.”
Unlike the fun-house scene, McAvoy’s next project is
by the book: He’ll star as Lord Asriel on His Dark Materi-
als (debuting later this year on HBO), based on Philip
Pullman’s best-selling trilogy. “They’re completely differ-
ent [roles],” he says. “That allows me, as an actor, to flex
my muscles and keep interested in what I do.” Asriel, a
character from a parallel reality where a person’s soul
exists outside their body as a talking animal, is “so overly
certain and selfish.” With the character on a quest to
unlock the secrets of a mystical particle, McAvoy adds,
“he’s not gonna change his world, he’s not gonna change
our world, he’s gonna change all the worlds.”
You know, the usual. �
KILL YOUR
DARLINGS
Muschietti’s first
pass at the hor-
ror sequel, con-
tinuing the story
of Pennywise
and the Losers’
Club 27 years
later, clocked in
at four hours. “I
realized that is
unreleasable,
so I shaved it
a little,” he says.
But fans may still
get to see all that
footage: “It
hopefully will be
released as a
director’s cut.”
BELIEVE IN
PRACTICAL
MAGIC
The filmmaker
faced a night-
mare of his own
on Chapter Two:
shooting James
McAvoy’s big
hall-of-mirrors
scene without
the option of fix-
ing everything in
post. “You see
the camera
reflected all the
time, the lights,
and everything,”
he explains. “We
basically built
the set with that
in mind. We had
one-way mirrors,
so you could
shoot two
cameras at the
same time:
the camera
inside the maze
and the camera
outside.”
TAKE
ADVANTAGE
OF THE
SOURCE
MATERIAL
One book scene
that hasn’t been
adapted in a film
until now
is the death of
Adrian Mellon,
the gay man
thrown over a
bridge by bigots
and then killed
by Pennywise.
The moment
begins Stephen
King’s novel, and
Muschietti says
that “it was
always an essen-
tial part” of his
script because
“the impact of the
event was very
deep.”
↑ What won’t
Pennywise
(Bill Skarsgård)
do to have
the last laugh?
→ Director Andy
Muschietti’s
2017 IT is the
fourth-highest-
grossing
R-rated film of
all time
(domestic)
WORDS TO
THE ÕWISE
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
IT Chapter Two director ANDY MUSCHIETTI
reveals three things he learned while
making the scarefest. BY NICK ROMANO
WARNER BROS.
