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IT: Welcome to Derry and the Origin of Pennywise’s Human Half
Spoilers follow for IT: Welcome to Derry Episodes 1-7.
Episode 7 of IT: Welcome to Derry introduced us to Bob Gray, a character briefly glimpsed in the movie IT Chapter Two but one who is of great interest to fans of Stephen King’s creation. Essentially, Bob Gray is the original, human Pennywise, whose form It began to favor taking to hunt the children of Derry. Now Welcome to Derry is finally telling his story.
Andy Muschietti, who directed the IT movies and developed Welcome to Derry with his sister/producing partner Barbara Muschietti and co-showrunner Jason Fuchs, told me that the goal of the show was always to dig into the “big enigmas” that are presented in the Stephen King book. He felt that King intentionally created an incomplete puzzle, with cryptic characters and events that lent themselves to being further explored. And chief among them was the character of Bob Gray, aka the man who would become Pennywise.
Bob Gray, the Man Behind the Clown
“Bob Gray, the man behind the clown,” said Andy. “[He’s] an absolute mystery. It's mentioned a couple of times [in the book], but never is there really a fleshing out of the story.”
Barbara points out that the mystery of this character was a big part of what brought the show into existence, and it all came from the conversations that Andy and Pennywise actor Bill Skarsgård had during production of IT Chapter Two in 2018.
“Bill did a very small flashback into Bob Gray and loved it,” she recalled. “So they started talking about exploring that. And when the pandemic came, Andy's like, ‘Let's start talking about that!’”
With the development time the pandemic allowed, the Muschiettis and Skarsgård started to really dig in on what Bob Gray’s story might be, as it has never been fleshed out by Stephen King. Yes, we know about Pennywise’s cosmic origins, but the dancing clown? Not so much. Until now.
“It's more like an incarnation of Bob Gray [in IT Chapter Two], it's an IT incarnation, so you can see the evil behind,” said Andy. “But who was Bob Gray really? It all started there. And then delving deeper into it, I went back into all the interludes and all the catastrophic events that are depicted in every one of the cycles. And I saw a story there, a hidden story that was worth telling. And of course there was a lot of invention, which was part of the excitement of it. It's like, OK, we're going to fill the gaps, put all the pieces of the puzzle that are missing.”
The Origin of Pennywise’s Human Self
The approach then was to figure out who the human character was. For starters, the writers and producers knew they didn’t want him to be some kind of a psychopath. And they wanted to find the humanity of the character.
“It's shrouded in a bit of darkness and ominousness,” said Andy. “But we presented him as someone that was benign, that was basically someone that life didn't work very well for. He has a daughter and he wants to do well. And then when Bill finally came in, we started really granularly exploring the character and he said, ‘All this is good, but I don't think we should do such a wholesome thing.’ And that's where alcoholism appeared, the grumpiness. And so it's very nuanced. You see a character that is taking swigs from a flask in between when the curtains fall. And there's a reason for that. The reason is the death of his wife.”
This is the backstory that was created for the character by Muschietti, Skarsgård, and the show’s writers, and which we get a true feel for in Episode 7.
“Bob Gray was a big clown in a big circus,” explains Andy. “One day he lost his wife and that sort of pushed him into a down-spiraling hole where he became an alcoholic. He was fired from the circus, rehired sometime later into a small traveling circus, and we have this scene where he's basically talking to his daughter and he reminisces about the good old times. And even though he's in bad shape right now, because he's an alcoholic, he has hope. And Ingrid, his little daughter, is what keeps the hope alive for him.”
Of course, Ingrid is Ingrid Kersh, aka Periwinkle (another invention of Welcome to Derry’s), the adult version of whom is played by Madeleine Stowe. And certainly her dad’s disappearance after his run-in with IT leads her life to a not-great place, to say the least. But that’s a different story.
Maturin, The Dark Tower Connections, and Welcome to Derry Seasons 2 and 3
The Muschiettis told me that when they started putting the story together for the show, they had much more than they could possibly include in just one season. And so a three-season plan was hatched, as the writers had to take chunks of story out and save them for future seasons.
“It's a bigger story that goes across the two following seasons,” Andy explained. “It talks more about the reason of IT, what is IT, what does IT want, and why is IT in this plane of existence? But also, it's a glimpse into the bigger mythology that looms on the other side. The thing with the book is that it's told from the perspective of our human characters very much. There's only like two or three moments that, through the Maturin root or the Smoke-Hole, we access other planes of reality, but it's very sparse. It's just very, very contained, but it does really connect to other works of Stephen King, mainly The Dark Tower. And there's so much about the turtle, Maturin. That is one of those things that people who love these movies, they really are into Maturin. So basically across the two more seasons, we're going to explore the bigger mythology.”
IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 8, Season 1 Finale Release Date and Time
The final episode of IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1 will debut on HBO Max at 6pm PT/9pm ET on Sunday, December 14. Tell them Bob Gray sent you!
