9 minute read
Bill Skarsgård
He comes from the most famous acting dynasty in Sweden, and he’s about to take on a dream role that is the stuff of nightmares.
At 17, he discovered the difference on the set of Arn, a two-part epic with the biggest budget in Swedish cinema history. It also featured the country’s best-known actors, which naturally included his father as well as Gustaf and Valter. “I read this script and I was about to do this film myself and I could hear my dad and my brother talking about the things that worked or didn’t work, what needs to be changed,” he says. “And I’d felt the same way, maybe when I’ve watched a movie: ‘I don’t believe this performance.’ Or, ‘This feels forced.’ All these things that stop a movie working, I’ve had those visceral feelings. And I realised that problem-solving is part of acting. It’s what makes it so much fun.”
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His next role comes with a big list of problems. Skarsgård is a methodical actor – he likes to research, he relishes character arcs and growth and all the other things he used to discuss with his father and brothers over the dinner table. In It, he plays a demented spirit, as old as time, who every 27 years awakes to feed on children’s flesh. He can appear in any form but tends to materialise as a clown called Pennywise – because Stephen King, who wrote the 1,200-page novel in the 1980s, believes that deep down, everyone is scared of clowns. He is the embodiment of evil, the manifestation of whatever his victims fear most. Character motivation is a tricky one here.
Then there’s the baggage. When the teaser trailer landed in March, it racked up 197m views in 24 hours, racing past the previous record-holder, the billion-dollar-grossing The Fate of the Furious. If that seems surprising for a horror film, it shouldn’t. It bullseyes a Venn diagram of nostalgia – for the novel, for the Tim Curry-starring TV series, and for the kind of ’80s monster shocks that Netflix smash Stranger Things rode to ubiquity last year.
“Stranger Things was released in the middle of shooting and everyone was like, ‘Oh shit,’” says Skarsgård. “I binged the whole thing in Toronto. And I thought, shit, there’s a lot of similarities. It’s set in the ’80s, it’s kids and bikes and monsters.” The chronology, however, is slightly about face. When It was still in development, Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers pitched to direct it. Warner Bros was unwilling to trust its franchise to a pair of untested directors, so the Duffer Brothers decided to create their own spin instead. Then they stuffed it with references to It, The Mist and Carrie. “Watching Stranger Things is [like] watching Steve King’s Greatest Hits,” tweeted Stephen King last year. “I mean that in a good way.”
Even before Warner Bros politely declined the Duffers, rebooting It had proved torturous. When the studio optioned the rights in 2009, it was determined to squeeze King’s enormous novel into a single feature. The Duffers had considered this near-impossible without stripping the plot of its intricacy. The book follows seven misfit kids, the Losers Club, who have to deal first with bullies, then the demonic clown that has terrorised their town for decades. It also tracks them two decades later, when Pennywise returns and they need to reassemble to vanquish him again. It is about good and evil but also camaraderie and the power of friendship.
Original scriptwriter David Kajganich tried to compress It and failed. By 2012, True Detective director Cary Fukunaga was onboard and the project had mushroomed into two films; the first would deal with the characters as kids, the second with Pennywise’s reappearance when they were adults. Actor Will Poulter was cast as the clown. Stephen King blessed the script. All seemed good. Then Fukunaga fell out with the studio. He quit and his star followed.
On came Muschietti, director of breakout horror hit Mama, who reworked the script (though Fukunaga retains a credit) to ramp it up to an ‘R’ rating. In that, it honours the source material; King’s novel is, on one hand, a Stand By Me-style story of kids discovering their inner strength. But it also opens with a clown ripping off a seven-yearold’s arm in a storm drain and features a scene in which the kids have group sex in a sewer.
The 1990 TV series, which debuted before HBO made graphic violence de rigeur for prestige TV, had to curb the gore. It relied instead on shocks and the creepy disjunction in how cheerfully Curry’s clown lured children to their deaths. When Skarsgård’s casting was announced, the reaction in those corners of the internet in which horror and nostalgia coalesce – ie, the obsessive ones – was mixed. The original Pennywise was a monster, but he wasn’t monstrous. Like John Wayne Gacy, the clown-costumed serial killer who murdered 33 children in the 1970s, Pennywise wasn’t supposed to be scary until you couldn’t escape. Skarsgård looked demonic. He didn’t walk, he scuttled. What child would follow this clown anywhere?
Considering Skarsgård has been on-screen since he was nine, he has done well to avoid even a hint of child actor syndrome. But the Swedish film industry is small and its pressures are slight. This, coupled with his laissez-faire approach to acting at the start of his career, can make it feel as though luck, more than effort, has steered his rise. And he admits it’s played a part.
In 2009, Skarsgård won four lead roles, each of which offered enough variety and range for a young actor to showcase his chops. In Simple Simon, he played a boy with Asperger’s who has to help his brother find a new girlfriend. In Behind Blue Skies he was a teenager who escapes his alcoholic father and becomes ensnared in a cocaine-smuggling ring, where he falls for his boss’s daughter. The Swedish film industry only makes “around 30 films a year” and this was unheard of. “I finished them all before the first one came out,” he says. “I don’t think I would have gotten all these parts if they were released before I booked the other ones. I was still this kind of undiscovered thing, even though I’d just finished four films. But it was about to be a year and a half of Bill Skarsgård. I was aware that I wasn’t going to be able to work in Sweden for quite some time.”
So he decamped to the States, where his name snared him an agent, and he auditioned for everything, just in case. He lost roles because his ears stuck out too much or his jaw didn’t jut out quite right. In Sweden, an audition lasted an hour. Here, he was in and out in 10 minutes. Directors were looking for types, and he didn’t want to be typecast, so he didn’t mind too much. Alexander had warned him not to rush. Enjoy yourself, wait for the right project to come along and don’t get defined too early. When a residual cheque from an old feature came through he flew two friends out, to drive the car he couldn’t and just hang out. He felt a man should have money, lose it all, then find it again later. So they’d hit clubs then crash in Airbnbs and spend the days tearing through LA in an uninsured car, absorbing Hollywood, discovering just how far they really were from Stockholm.
He was having fun, so when his agent passed him the script for a new Netflix vampire show, he demurred. His brother was already playing a hunky bloodsucker in True Blood and, well, vampires? He wanted to play a character with edge, not one that excited teenage girls. But they insisted. He read it and thought he could see something in this undead murder mystery. He went up for the lead and a week later was driving when his team at William Morris crowded round their speakerphone: “Congratulaaaaaaations!” Skarsgård called his father, a man who had worked for more than a decade before landing his first American role and who had told his son that after that domestic streak, he’d have to knuckle down and build up his career through bit parts. It had actually only taken six weeks, he explained. “Fuck off,” came the response from Stockholm.
Back home, he’d made boys turning into men his speciality. Each tremor of his bottom lip seemed weighted with the pain of discovering that the world is not as he thought and can never be again. But now he swept back his goofy side-parting, shook off any vestiges of gawky teen, and reinvented himself as a heartthrob.
Hemlock Grove was no House of Cards, but reviewers recognised that Skarsgård was good in a bad show. Three seasons drenched in fake blood also proved his horror chops. “Audiences and producers and studios see you in one thing and they’re like, ‘Ah, now he’s that,’” he says. “It’s just a good career strategy to try and be versatile, so that the people who actually pay for the tickets don’t get bored.”
Skarsgård’s Pennywise may horrify. It may confound. But it certainly won’t bore. To put distance between his performance and Curry’s, he trained with a contortionist who taught him how to bend his six-foot-three frame into alarming shapes. On set, he would drool and babble in nonsensical Swedish, until his co-stars were so scared they could barely breathe.
“I worked on that idea of what fear is and how it would manifest itself,” he says. “This thing is created by children. There’s this element of Pennywise that is essentially just a horrific child. So I really focused on that: what fear was and how the kids would perceive that fear.” But he had to carve the character out in isolation. Muschietti didn’t want to dilute the shock of seeing Skarsgård for the first time, so he was squirrelled away and could only talk to the woman who dressed him in a sweaty suit and the two prosthetics guys who glued stuff to his face and the woman who shoved glowing contacts in his eyes. And like Pennywise, forever trapped in the sewers, he felt lonely.
“I like bonding with a crew,” he says. “The whole atmosphere of a film crew really feeds me, gives me energy and I translate that into whatever I’m doing. But I looked so fucking horrible that the crew members had a hard time looking at me. So I wasn’t hanging around, goofing around with anyone, really. Instead, you kind of become an observer of everyone.”
“At the wrap party, Bill said he was a little sad to have been separated from us,” says Finn Wolfhard, who starred in Stranger Things and plays Losers Club member Richie Tozier. “He heard how much fun we had for the first three months. We were together constantly and poor Bill was stashed away to protect from press leaks and to make his eventual appearance even more horrific. It must have been tough for him, but the intention behind it – I mean, you will see, it definitely works on screen.”
At first, Skarsgård’s co-stars insisted they wouldn’t be scared. It was only a film, right? And he’d seemed nice enough at the readthrough. Then he walked on set. “Bill is such a sweet person in real life, but when it comes time to shoot he, no doubt, goes full evil,” says Jack Dylan Grazer, who plays Eddie Kaspbrak, the first Loser to experience the full Pennywise. “Before a take he would scream in my face and really transport the both of us into a genuine state of extreme angst and fear. He used a lot of the environment around him to get into character. He would dance, howl, crawl around the room. He just transformed into this devilish creature.”
Skarsgård has four younger siblings and making children cry was not something that came naturally. “It feels so wrong,” he says. “The most sinister or evil thing is not only scaring a child but really enjoying the scare while you’re doing it. There was also this kind of mocking hate that Pennywise has.
He actually hates these children. When they’re at their most scared, he’s mocking them and he enjoys that so much.”
When Skarsgård was a child, he would sit with Stellan and watch foreign films. He was too young to read the subtitles, so his father would translate, or pause the movie occasionally and explain what was going on. The best films were the ones where his father didn’t have to explain too much, when the performances told the story even when he didn’t understand the words. “I remember watching Seven Samurai when I was eight and it was fantastic for an eight-year-old to watch, because it’s just such an amazing adventure story. And I think that kids can, at a young age, appreciate movies that otherwise would be considered adult films.”
Great stories are universal, he says. What makes an eight-year-old smile in Stockholm will do the same for a kid in New York or Tokyo or Karachi. There’s more that makes us the same than makes us different. “We’re living in a time where there’s these countering forces that are trying to regress the world back to something border-based, nationalistic,” he says. “But countries, nations, borders – they’re illusions.” Some experiences, like love and friendship and growing up, are universal. And so is fear. Because it doesn’t matter where in the world you come from. Everyone’s afraid of clowns.
