ames McAvoy’s first encounter with
Pennywise came when he was 15,
not much older than the average age
of the Losers’ Club kids when they
faced the murderous clown in Ste-
phen King ’s 1986 novel IT. The then
teen from Glasgow, already a bud-
ding fan of science fiction and fantasy, had tackled the
Lord of the Rings series a few years earlier. So reading
something as “incredibly deep and dense” as King ’s
1,138-page horror story wasn’t a stretch. “I didn’t find it
that scary,” McAvoy says.
Now at 40, the actor is around the same age as the
grown-up Losers’ Club members in IT Chapter Two
(Sept. 6). McAvoy plays the adult version of Bill in direc-
tor Andy Muschietti’s sequel to his 2017 adaptation of
the horror classic. But when McAvoy faced King ’s con-
cept of a killer clown this time around, he definitely
wasn’t as blasé as he was in his youth.
“When I reread IT as an adult for the film, I actually
had nightmares about Pennywise in a way that I never
did as a child,” he admits. Bill Skarsgård’s bone-chilling
clown makeup as Pennywise notwithstanding, McAvoy’s
new outlook on the story may be the same reason he
keeps returning to a very particular kind of science-
fiction and fantasy role: the half-goat faun Mr. Tumnus
in the first Chronicles of Narnia movie; benevolent
genius Professor Xavier in X-Men films; the buff, vil-
lainous Beast and his many personalities in the
Unbreakable sequels. Clearly, the actor is drawn not
only to a certain brand of bad assery in his characters
but to films that tend to transcend their genres.
With IT, specifically, he found King didn’t just want
to scare readers: “He’s writing about a small American
town, he’s writing about death, he’s writing about
growing old, growing up. And the movie is very much
about that. You could argue the first movie is as much
Stand by Me and Goonies and all those things as it is a
horror movie.”
In Chapter Two, it’s been 27 years since the Losers
made a pact to return to Derry should Pennywise ever
rise again. Bill, played as an adolescent in the 2017 film
by Jaeden Martell, is now a Hollywood screenwriter.
His stutter’s nearly gone, but he’s “very lost and drifting
through life,” McAvoy says. Bill can’t remember his
childhood in Derry, nor Georgie, the little brother who
died when Pennywise dragged the child down a sewer
drain. After Mike (Isaiah Mustafa) calls the gang back↑ James McAvoy
is done clowning
around in
IT Chapter Two