Bill Skarsgård Muses On Fame Fear And His Inevitable Return

As he reimagines one of our favourite villains, considers fame, fan culture and why we’re hooked on fear.

- Adrienne Westenfeld

When Bill Skarsgård set out to audition for the role of Pennywise, the child-eating clown, in a new film adaptation of Stephen King’s It, it seemed to him that every journeyman actor in Los Angeles was up to play the infamous villain. Then best known for his work in Hemlock Grove, Netflix’s splashy, violent phantasmagoria about supernatural creatures in the small Pennsylvanian town that the series is named after, Skarsgård didn’t expect to land the much-coveted part. Nonetheless, he pursued it with single-minded devotion, even going so far as to drive to his callback audition in full clown-face.

“It was a really fun audition because it was about my interpretation of an existing character,” Skarsgård says. “It’s left up to your imagination to come up with something fun and new. I didn’t expect to get the part, but four or five steps later when I committed to the role, it became real and I was terrified. How do you approach a character in a new way and how do you ensure that it’s something that people will like and respond to?”

Respond to it they did: It enjoyed the biggest opening weekend in cinematic history for a horror film, raking in USD123.4 million in American cinemas alone. Critics praised Skarsgård for his inhuman, malevolent interpretation of Pennywise, as in the Forbes review that described him as, “amusing one moment and absolutely terrifying the next”.