Bill Skarsgård’s favourite horror movie isn’t even a horror movie: “I wasn’t a huge fan”
The makers of IT: Welcome to Derry, the TV prequel to the two more recent Stephen King movies that worked so well in a kind of ‘even more horrific partner to Stranger Things’ way, obviously had a conundrum. And it was that what people really wanted was more of Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.
But there were issues with that due to this being an eight-episode TV series: firstly, Skarsgård doesn’t come cheap as a proper movie actor, and secondly, Pennywise requires considerable special effects, which again means a hit on the budget sheet. So what they did was tease his arrival for at least three to four full episodes, ramping up the anticipation, but also leaving themselves open to impatient audiences sighing and thinking, “When’s the clown coming?”
Which is a bit unfair, because Welcome to Derry was superbly done, brilliantly acted and genuinely scary, with Andy Muschietti who directed the films in 2017 and 2019 returning and Skarsgård doing what he did so well in those movies, namely shapeshifting all over the place, munching limbs off people and generally being a complete menace to anyone stupid enough to go near a sewer.
Skarsgård, though, apparently almost didn’t come back for the part, worried that after two movies he might be milking the character, but he relented and felt in the end they were able to show parts of Pennywise that hadn’t been seen before, and that he had a lot of fun filming the series.
Season two of Welcome to Derry has yet to be greenlit, but if it happens, it would be more horror for Skarsgård, who, aside from the world of IT, also appeared in Robert Eggers’ 2024 film Nosferatu as the terrifying Count Orlok, a role that he described as “pure evil”. But despite the Swedish actor seeming to gravitate toward the darker side of things (he also starred in a superfluous reboot of Brandon Lee’s gothic hit The Crow), Skarsgård says he was never really brought up watching the scary stuff.
He told Dazed: “I wasn’t a huge fan of horror films growing up, I was never super into the sensation of getting scared. But then I watched a lot because I’ve been doing horror so much.”
And asked which movie stood out the most for him as a favourite example of horror done right, Skarsgård plumped for Oldboy, a 2003 action thriller that wouldn’t really be described as a straightforward example of the genre, but certainly contains plenty of gruesome elements and actually shared a Director of Photography with 2017’s It in the form of Chung-hoon Chung.
Skarsgård added: “I don’t mind villainous parts – I think there’s something to them that makes them more complex and interesting, at least in the sense of ‘good guy, bad guy’. The good guys are usually pretty one-dimensional, where traditionally bad guys are more cunning. They have a lot more drive and motives, and manipulation.”
Starring Choi Min-sik as an abducted businessman who awakes to find himself sealed in a room with only a TV for company, the South Korean-made Oldboy was a huge critical success on release. It has since gone down as one of the finest films of all time, spawning a 2013 American remake starring Elizabeth Olsen and Josh Brolin.
Skarsgård, meanwhile, is currently filming Lords of War with Nicolas Cage, a thriller about an arms dealer, and also has a historical action epic on the way called Emperor, with Adrien Brody.
