EW The Ultimate Guide to Stephen King

By The Editors of Entertainment Weekly

Entertainment Weekly presents The Ultimate Guide to Stephen King.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Entertainment Weekly
• Release date: Aug 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781547852352

Book preview

One.

Send in the Clown

INSIDE THE TERRIFYING 2017 AND 2019 IT FILMS

ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT SAMMELIN

A Very Scary Sequel

IT CHAPTER TWO

Fright Club

ALL GROWN UP, THE MEMBERS OF THE LOSERS’ CLUB ARE CALLED BACK HOME TO CONFRONT THE TRAUMA OF THEIR PAST IN DIRECTOR ANDY MUSCHIETTI’S TERRIFYING IT CHAPTER TWO.

By Joe McGovern with reporting by Anthony Breznican

The Losers, reunited. From left: Richie Tozier (Bill Hader), Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain), Bill Denbrough (James McAvoy), Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone), Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) and Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan).

AS SHE STARED AT THE TWO PHOTOGRAPHS, Jessica Chastain was puzzled. It was the fall of 2016, and the Oscar-nominated actress had received a message from her friend Andy Muschietti, the director of Chastain’s 2013 sleeper hit Mama. Muschietti was in production on the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of It, based on Stephen King’s classic 1986 novel about a shape-shifting monstrosity that terrorizes a small town in Maine, preying mainly on children because of their acute sense of fear.

Andy sent a side-by-side picture of me and Sophia, says Chastain, referring to young actress Sophia Lillis, who Muschietti had cast in It as Beverly, the sole female member of the teenage Losers’ Club. The seven outcasts band together to take on the creature, which most often adopts the shape of a sinister sewer-dwelling clown called Pennywise. And he was like, ‘What do you think?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know. What is it?’

It, as it happened, was about to be the basis for their latest collaboration. For the second chapter of his horrifying adaptation of King’s novel, Muschietti needed a new cast of adult actors to play the grown-up versions of the members of the Losers’ Club. Although the 1,100-plus-page book alternated between following the characters as children and adults, Muschietti had eliminated the grown-up plotline to focus only on the kids’ story the first time around. The gamble paid off. Audiences freaked for It, which soon became the most successful King adaptation ever (earning more than his top four biggest hits combined) and the highest-grossing horror movie of all time.

Now it was time for the adults’ part of the tale. Within months of the first movie’s release, Chastain was cast to play Beverly in It Chapter Two, set 27 years after the events of the first film. A sexual-abuse survivor, Beverly is now a successful fashion designer in Chicago when she gets word that the demagogic force has come back to her hometown. (A gay man played by Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan becomes the victim of a deeply unsettling hate crime and It’s first fatality.) The news cracks open memories she’d locked away. I love fashion designers, says Chastain, but, yes, Beverly’s job is a metaphor for her very strong exterior. She’s hiding something, obviously, from a lot of people.

Chastain, whose record of playing strong women includes leads in Zero Dark Thirty and Molly’s Game, admits, You have to be careful not to be the girl who’s standing around for the men to carry through the story. (In a much-discussed scene in King’s novel, teenage Beverly has sex with all six of her friends—a sequence that the author himself admits has not aged well.) But the actress trusted Muschietti and his sister Barbara, a producer on both It films, and the bench of talent who were cast as her fellow Losers.

They include James McAvoy as Bill, now a successful horror novelist living in Los Angeles, and Bill Hader as Richie, who grew up to be a fast-talking radio deejay. (Both actors costarred with Chastain in the indie The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby.) Eddie (The Wire’s James Ransone) owns a limo company in New York, Ben (Jay Ryan of the CW’s Beauty & the Beast) is an architect in Nebraska, Stan (Andy Bean) runs an Atlanta accounting firm, while Mike (former football pro and Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa), now a librarian, is the sole member still living in Maine and the first to know when It is back. None of the seven have had children of their own.

That’s an interesting thing in the book as well, says McAvoy, pointing out the little Freudian traits that link the characters, even though they’ve all lost touch after 27 years. You come back to your old town, and you’re going to have epiphany moments. That’s what makes the story interesting as a universal experience, even beyond the supernatural experience. We’re the safest people we could be around, and we also remind each other of the most horrible things.

The adult actors took cues from their teenage counterparts, who also appear in flashbacks in the second film. Finn [Wolfhard] gave me a good road map for how to play Richie, says Emmy winner Hader (HBO’s Barry) of his jokester character. Kiwi actor Ryan received something even more special from Jeremy Ray Taylor, whose Ben endures bullying over his weight in the first movie: a letter from teenage Ben to adult Ben. It was all about how ‘I hope I’m not lonely when I’m an older man, and I hope I have the guts to reveal my feelings,’ says Ryan. It was all this teenage fear, told with such incredible sweetness, and I just needed to harness that feeling to play Ben.

Even for the adults, there is plenty of reason to feel fearful, however—It is out for revenge. The arc of the first movie is that he, for the first time, experiences fear himself, says actor Bill Skarsgård, who plays the villain. It fuels hatred and anger toward the kids, who will be adults in this one, so I think there might be an even more vicious Pennywise. He’s really going after it.

Which is saying something. In the first chapter, whether poised quietly in a storm drain or leaping from a projection screen like a demonic ape, Skarsgård delivered a performance in the role that was a geyser of terror—and a pop-culture touchstone, as the character was evoked in politics and a million social media memes. Now that he has cause to be mad as hell, look out.

While making the first film, Muschietti deliberately sequestered Skarsgård away from the child stars in order to capture a genuine

Reviews for EW The Ultimate Guide to Stephen King

[tobinelliott · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Not sure why I fall for these. Big photos, and half-baked articles that almost bump up against something interesting to say, but then stop before they get there.