Bill Skarsgård Breaks Down Pennywise’s Mind-Bending Relationship with Time in IT: WELCOME TO DERRY
Set decades before the events of the It films, It: Welcome to Derry digs deeper into the mythos of Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Now, Bill Skarsgård has weighed in on one of the most interesting ideas introduced in the show… Pennywise’s apparent ability to experience time in a completely different way than everyone else.
By the end of It: Welcome to Derry Season 1, the timeline gets turned inside out. The story takes place in 1962, which is 27 years after the first It movie and 54 years before It: Chapter Two. Yet, Pennywise already knows everything that happens in 1989 and 2016.
His plan centers on targeting children early enough to erase the future Losers Club entirely, making sure they’re never born and never able to defeat him. That revelation makes it clear that time doesn’t move normally for this creature.
Skarsgård addressed this strange wrinkle in an interview, saying: “I thought that was an interesting thing that the character is kind of going in two different directions,” he said.
“But what's time to something that is not part of this dimension?” The idea suggests Pennywise isn’t bound to linear time at all. Instead, he may be looping through it, or jumping across eras whenever it suits him.
Trying to pin down how that works might be impossible, even for the actor playing him. “It's so abstract this transdimensional evil being thing with a spider and a turtle or whatever. It is really out there. From reading the book, you can interpret it a thousand different ways,” Skarsgård explained.
The turtle he’s referring to is Maturin, an ancient cosmic force that predates time itself and stands as Pennywise’s opposite in Stephen King’s wider mythology. Even so, the rules are hazy at best. “I'm pretty sure Stephen King doesn't really know,” Skarsgård admitted.
If Pennywise truly comes from the same place as Maturin, it makes sense that human ideas of past, present, and future wouldn’t apply to him. As messy as that sounds, Skarsgård says viewers shouldn’t stress too much over the mechanics.
“It's kind of this little bookend thing how we ended it,” he said. “I'm not quite sure where we're going with it, but there's something fun to explore that Pennywise might be going backwards, but it's forwards for him just as it is for the audience who are.”
That backward journey is only getting started. Under the guidance of Andy Muschietti, the plan is for It: Welcome to Derry to run for three seasons, each moving further into the past.
Season 2 is expected to jump back to 1935, with Season 3 diving even deeper into Derry’s cursed history in 1908.