Movies - TV
Seeing Tim Curry In A Sewer On The Set Of IT Was Apparently As Scary As It Sounds
By JOSHUA MEYER
In 1990, Tim Curry donned the white clown make-up for his role as Pennywise the Clown for the two-part TV miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s “It.” Within the first 10 minutes of “It,” a boy in a yellow raincoat named Georgie Denbrough (Tony Dakota) encounters a smooth-talking Pennywise, who then proceeds to terrify viewers as he drags the child down into the sewers.
Curry revealed at Fan Expo Canada in 2017 that this scene was just as scary for the young actor as it was for the audience, sharing that during filming, Dakota “stopped and said, 'Tim... You're scaring me.'” Curry said that he sympathizes with child actors, but when the moderator joked about Dakota possibly needing years of therapy, the actor quipped, “I hope so!”
The 2017 film adaptation perhaps understood the power of this scene, prompting the movie to have Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) encounter the sewer-dwelling Pennywise in the first five minutes. Dakota later reprised his role as an adult version of Georgie in the 2019 short film “Georgie” and also appeared as himself in the documentary "Pennywise: The Story of It."