Talk about a real eyesore. Episode 4 of It: Welcome to Derry had everyone at home shielding their after Derry High School pupil Marge Truman (Matilda Lawler) suddenly found herself gifted — make that cursed — with a pair of elongated snail eyes as part of a Pennywise-induced hallucination. While the shape-shifter’s previous monsters (think Pickle Dad and Mother Thing) have scared his young pursuers silly without necessarily causing any serious injuries, that’s not the case here. In an effort to get rid of her extended eyeballs, Marge runs to the shop room and goes under the blade… literally.
“Luckily the saw had tape on it,” Lawler tells Gold Derby about filming that “Hell no!” moment when her alter ego attempts to saw her own eyeballs off. “Don’t worry — no children were harmed in the making of this show! But yeah, they go there; it got gory and that was fun.”
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The roots of that optical transformation extend back to an earlier scene in the episode when Marge is in science class half-listening to her teacher talk about a parasitic worm that slithers its way into land snails and makes their eyes swell to gross proportions. The reason she’s so distracted is due to her reluctant participation in a Carrie-like scheme to humiliate her previously close pal Lily (Clara Stack) in order to regain her own place in the popular girls’ club. But at the last minute, Marge is attacked by her guilty conscience… which opens the door for a Pennywise attack.
Standing in front of the mirror if the girls’ bathroom, she feels a sudden onset of eye pain and when she leans in to get a better look, her pupils slither out of their sockets, knocking her glasses to the floor. In seconds, Marge’s eyesight goes from human-vision to snail-vision as she screams, “My eyes, my eyes!” Stumbling out of the bathroom and down the hall, she enters the shop room and grabs the nearest sharp object to cut the cone-shaped eyeballs back to normal size. When that doesn’t work, she turns to the table saw, slicing into her sclera in a gruesome close-up.
Lily enters and pulls her regretfully duplicitous away, but the damage has been done. One of Marge’s eyes is severely injured and a group of students and teachers have entered just in time to see Lily kneeling over her, sharp implement in hand.
If that sequence is tough for you to watch, rest assured that Lawler fells your pain. “I also have a very weird thing with eyes,” the actress reveals. “Eyes are such a vulnerable part of our bodies. Whenever I see people touch their eyes, it always icks me out! So when I read that scene in the script, I though, ‘Whoa, OK — this is going to be hard.”
Fortunately, the Welcome to Derry crew made sure the sequence was more “cool” than “ick” for Lawler to film. “There was this prosthetic that I wore that covered about half of my face,” she recalls. “It had these circles that kind of looked like big, gory glasses. [The VFX team] attached wires to the prosthetic and CGI’d the snail eyes on top of those wires. It was definitely a little strange to be having a meltdown over these wires sticking out of my head!”
Lawler reveals that the original version of the scene called for Pennywise to add to Marge’s plight by bestowing her snail eyes with a Pinocchio effect — a suitable punishment for someone caught in a lie. “In the initial draft of the script, the eyes kept getting longer and longer,” the actress says. “At one point, they had these wires that were a foot long and they kept falling off of my eyes! The crew would have to pick them up and put them back on. It was a mess in the best possible way.”
Speaking of messy, Welcome to Derry‘s fourth episode ends with an extended lore drop that seriously complicates the lives of the show’s adult characters… and brings them one step closer to Pennywise. After his 50 years-in-the-making reunion with childhood flame Rose (Kimberly Guerrero) in the third chapter, Gen. Francis Shaw (James Remar) has pulled her nephew Taniel (Joshua Odjick) in for questioning. With the young man proving reluctant to talk, Shaw calls in a specialist at getting information out of unwilling informants: Dick Halloran (Chris Chalk), who is gifted with a certain psychic shine that’s well known to Stephen King fans.
After a gentle warning, Halloran tiptoes into Taniel’s mind and proceeds to get a full account of the long, long, long history that Derry’s indigenous community has with the killer clown from outer space — backstory that’s been adapted from King’s mammoth book. To briefly summarize all that mythology, a fallen star brought Pennywise to the state that would be Maine centuries ago, and the tribal ancestors found a way to keep the monstrous spirit contained. But freeing Pennywise was one of many evils that European colonists unleashed when they landed on these shores and Rose and her people have been trying to restore the balance ever since.
That crucial piece of Derry history speaks directly to one of Welcome to Derry‘s primary themes — reckoning with the horrors of the racial inequities in America’s past. And Guerrero says it’s significant that Halloran learns what Rose and her people already knew.
“The backstory that Shaw doesn’t see, but that every indigenous character knows is how much we care about the people of Derry,” the actress explains. “We don’t see it as ‘us and them.’ They are human beings and we have to do our best to protect them and keep this creature contained. It’s would be like somebody like Nikita Khrushchev or John F. Kennedy having access to the [nuclear] button. She’s got access to the button, and knows what it can release on the world.”
Continuing the nuclear war analogy that’s part of the show’s Cold War setting, Remar explains why Francis is so focused at rooting out Pennywise instead of leaving well enough alone. “Shaw’s philosophy is that we need a common enemy, like in World War II,” the actor says. “He thinks that fear is this great equalizer and people can unite behind fear. But really, he’s just trying to heal the wounds in himself. All that stuff he says about world power and world domination is B.S. when you come right down to it. He’s a wounded little kid and he’s going after the thing that wounded him.”
As for Halloran himself, Chalk says that his alter ego is forever changed by his trip to the past through Taniel’s mind. “He faces an entity whose power is so much greater than his,” the actor says of Halloran’s encounter with a version of Pennywise. “This is an entity who can get into him in a way that he can get into other peoples’ brains. So this is actual terror for Halloran.”
As King fans well know, Halloran will experience that kind of terror all over again when he takes up residence at a certain Colorado hotel. Chalk is the latest actor to play a role that the late Scatman Crothers originated onscreen in Stanley Kubrick‘s 1980 adaptation of The Shining. Asked if he studied Crothers’ version before taking on the younger version of the character, Chalk says he gave that movie “45 minutes” of his time. “After that, I’ve got to do my own thing,” he says with a laugh. “I want to honor the actors who did it before, but ultimately this is my shot — and I got to swing my bat on my own.”
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