The iconic horror movie character almost played by Tilda Swinton: “I swear to God”
The what-ifs of the film world are always fascinating.
One different move from one different casting director, and so much cultural history would look different. Imagine if Judy Garland hadn’t been picked for The Wizard of Oz, or if Leonardo DiCaprio had simply never been given his chance as an untrained actor. What if Audrey Hepburn had stayed a dancer and never become an actor – how much knock-on impact would that have had?
It would be easy to brush these things off as minor details, but it’s a butterfly effect. That’s exactly why casting is such a tricky task, or why, really, out of any job done on a project before it starts shooting, there is nothing as critical as finding the right people – the wrong choice can be disastrous, but the right one can be seismic.
What is the history of cinema built on if not a series of incredible casting calls… The right person bringing the right performance is the bedrock of everything, and so when hearing about a great performance that could have been, the heartbreak hits hard.
As the iconic villain Pennywise the Clown, Bill Skarsgård did a great job in It – he has the exact kind of hellish, terrifying stare the character needs, and he perfected that endlessly creepy, shiver-inducing smile, that’s a paralysingly scary glint in his eyes, but there was initially another option. At first, the directors wanted Pennywise to be a woman. Or, specifically, they wanted Pennywise to be Tilda Swinton.
“We auditioned literally hundreds of potential Bob Grays or Pennywises, and it was an amazing process,” producer Andrés Muschietti told Vanity Fair. With the clown being such an iconic role, the production managed to call in people who are far too famous to audition in any other scenario, adding, “We got to audition people that don’t audition anymore and a huge gamut of talent; women, younger age, older age, we really went through the spectrum of actors.”
Out of everyone, though, there was one name on their list that excited them most. Early on in the process, back when the team were in the dreaming stage, throwing names out there about who they’d love to see in the role if their wildest fantasies could come true, Swinton came up quickly.
They reached out, taking a chance on the daydream, but instantly, it was a no. “She wasn’t available,” Muschietti said. “No, no, I swear to God. She was not. We had a slot to shoot the movie, and she wasn’t available, so she didn’t even audition. But of course, we all thought about it.”
But just imagine. Imagine Swinton’s big eyes and alien-like face taking on that task, bringing her own creepy glint to the role. Imagine how the character might have morphed in her image into something more quietly sinister, or perhaps more outrightly insane.
The heartbreak is that we’ll simply never know. We can only chalk it up to one of the many could-have-beens in film history and be left to forever wonder.
