An Andor Star Almost Played Stephen King's Pennywise In The It Movies

It's funny to think that the "It" movie duology was once considered risky, but so it was when director Cary Joji Fukunaga was overseeing the two-part adaptation of Stephen King's hit horror novel in the 2010s. You can understand why industry folks were skeptical; at the time, King adaptations were increasingly being sequestered to the small screen (see: "Bag of Bones," "Under the Dome"), and it had been a minute since a film based on the horror maestro's work had captured the zeitgeist. The closest one had come to doing so back then was probably Frank Darabont's gut-wrenching take on "The Mist" in 2007, and even that was only a modest success initially.

You also have to remember the clown in the room. Not Fukunaga (though the filmmaker has since been charged with multiple allegations of sexually harassing and grooming young women on his projects), but the creepy clown toy in the 2015 "Poltergeist" remake, which left Hollywood with a bad case of coulrophobia. As The Wrap reported just three days after the movie opened in theaters, its middling performance across the board left New Line Cinema all the more wary of making a pair of films about a killer clown monster. So, with Fukunaga and the studio having already clashed over the "It" adaptation's budget and filming locations, that proved to be the final straw, resulting in the former's departure as director.

Apparently, Fukunaga's inability to cast Ben Mendelsohn as the aforementioned kid-eating clown was another crucial factor that contributed to his exiting the project. The "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" and "Andor" star was far from the only actor to almost play Pennywise (as he's better known), but his near involvement may be one of the more intriguing what-ifs to come out of this situation.

Okay, so maybe Ben Mendelsohn portraying a villain sounds a tad less groundbreaking nowadays than it did in 2015. That was, after all, right before he played the power-hungry Orson Krennic in "Rogue One," which he quickly followed up with his turns as the greedy CEO Nolan Sorrento in "Ready Player One" and the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham from 2018's "Robin Hood" (which is indeed "nonsensical but oddly charming," to quote /Film's review). Even so, I suspect that Mendelsohn's rendition of Pennywise the Dancing Clown would've been pretty different from the way Bill Skarsgård plays him in the smash-hit "It" movies that Andy Muschietti directed after Cary Joji Fukunaga stepped away.

For starters, Mendelsohn is more than 20 years older than Skarsgård. So, even if he'd adapted a higher-pitched voice the way Skarsgård does as Pennywise, he wouldn't have had that unsettling, child-like demeanor that Skarsgård's version adapts when he's trying to lure his young victims to their doom. Instead, he probably would've come across more like a grown man in a clown suit and makeup, much like Tim Curry's Pennywise in the 1990 "It" TV miniseries or even Ethan Hawke's Grabber in his clownish magician getup from "The Black Phone." As alarming as that reads on paper, it's not necessarily upsetting in the same way that Skarsgård's portrayal is.

It's also purely theoretical since Mendelsohn passed on the role after New Line Cinema tried to get him to take what The Wrap called a "sizable pay cut." Besides, he's excellent in the Stephen King adaptation that he actually did act in (the legitimately scary 2020 HBO miniseries "The Outsider," where he plays a grieving father), so I've got no complaints on my end.