‘It: Welcome to Derry’ Star Miles Ekhardt on Becoming Pennywise With Bill Skarsgård’s Help (Exclusive)

Bill Skarsgård wasn’t the only actor who got to play the toothy role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown on It: Welcome to Derry.

In Episode 5, Miles Ekhardt got to try the role on for size, too, after his character, Matty Clements, returned from the sewers to join the new losers on a mission into the underground. Though Matty initially presented himself as the real deal, claiming to have survived in Pennywise’s lair for the last four months, he was actually luring them down to the sewers. He revealed the It hiding within in a truly creepy song-and-dance moment as young Matty morphed into the killer clown.

To break down that terrifying transformation, his wild opening scare scene, and more, TV Insider caught up with It: Welcome to Derry star Miles Ekhardt!

Your character kicks off the series with a very disturbing scene with the car and the movie theater. What was it like for you to find out you were going to be the first one we see in this show?

Miles Ekhardt: Yeah, that was quite the experience reading the script, because I’d gone through all of this wondering if I would get this part… and eventually that’s all happening. I’m all signed, and I get to read this, and I notice I’m in the cold open, and then it’s this, “Oh, no, I’m not going to get to do all too much in this show.” Because it was a very quick realization that things were not going to go very well, but I enjoyed reading it. He was a more interesting character than I expected going in. I wasn’t too disturbed when I was first learning about all the stuff he would be going through.

Yeah, well, you said you figured out pretty early on that he wasn’t going to do well. Were you familiar with the book and the mention of that character’s name there?

Yeah, I vaguely know it’s that character, but this is a pretty different deal. That really has the name only taken from him. So  I wasn’t able in audition to figure out what could be happening here because I’m not a little toddler on a trike for the audition.

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Leading up to this episode, we saw that Matty has a pretty disturbing home life. What kind of backstory did you create as to why he wanted to leave Derry, what he was hoping to do?

Matty is very much built off of Eddie’s whole backstory — well, not that Eddie, but the much sadder of the Eddies. And so he has this whole system with his father, where there’s definitely abuse. He had this brother — in my little actor had canon, who ended up dying — and I think he didn’t plan all too much for what happens after he gets out of Derry. It was a very single-minded, “I have to find some possible way to get out of this situation.”

Every scare in the series for the children reveals something about them. What did the car and the family that turns wicked reveal to you about Matty?

I think that is playing into his very dysfunctional family, where he is seeing what is on the surface of this very, very 1960s, very nuclear little family, but as you’re looking deeper, there is something truly horrific going on in there, that there’s slowly the tension building. And I think that is It almost mocking his home life because that’s one thing he is truly scared of, his father and what is happening with his family.

Then you also get to see the monster baby. I’m sure when you’re filming it, you didn’t have the actual creature. So what was it like when you finally got to see it on my screen? 

We had a rubber version on a pole that we were throwing around the car. So there was something there. It was a little less expressive than the screen version, but I quite enjoyed getting to see it on screen. It’s so strange trying to figure out how a sequence is going to come, when you have everything put together, when you have the VFX, when you have all these scenes that are filmed like months apart, together. So I really enjoyed getting to see the actual baby and getting to see that this tension is actually properly getting somewhere.

Flashing forward to Episode 5, the scenes in the standpipe, that’s the first time we really get to see your character with some of these other kids — other than, I guess, you had that exchange with Ronnie in the movie theater — so what was it like for you just jumping into that dynamic that they kind of were establishing together?

I was quite glad to finally get to film with all these people who I’d been hanging out with for months on months by the time we reached Episode 5 in filming. I was a little intimidated in dealing with all these actors; they’ve been at this for a year by this point, since they started doing this. They had so much dynamic. They had all these characters going. But I felt like I didn’t need too much to get into that flow and that dynamic, because Matty is so detached as a character. He’s so deep into what is happening to him in his own world that I can just be focusing on that and what he’s thinking and all these very visceral things, which, in my opinion, are a lot easier to act than finding all these social subtleties. So I didn’t find that part too challenging.

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You play the character when he returns as though he is back, and you do a good job of convincing there. Can you just talk about playing him as not him, but also him?

Yeah. So most of the time, I was just playing straight Matty Clements, because It is really, really good at its job. There’s just these little, little bits that get more so as it goes on, where I actually get to play the Pennywise part of the role, like the tiny little bit of wanting to — you can see it on first watch as admiration to Lilly, but it is really just, “I really want to eat this person.” And when we get close to the sewers, just easing a little further out of this Matty and into something a little more neutral. And then when we’re there, and we’re spinning around, and I just get to pretend to be entirely a clown, and I don’t have to bother with the whole Matty part for this.

So did you look to Bill Skarsgård’s performance? How did you develop that scene where he’s dancing and transforming slowly into Pennywise?

Yeah, so that was something. I talked with Bill beforehand as we were figuring out the dynamics of that transition. And he is a very good actor. I was basically just spinning around a pole on progressively higher and higher boxes so I can match his height, slowly going from this timid little guy to, really, just my best impression of what Bill Skarsgård would sound like. There’s just so much energy everywhere in what he’s doing is much of this slightly twisted clown whimsy. And I did watch some of his performance before, some of the takes I was doing up there, so I had some general impression of what he was doing, but a lot of that was just my guesswork of what clowning is like, based on the first two movies.

You said you talked to Bill Skarsgård in preparing for that moment, but did you get to see him in his full garb, and what was your reaction to that moment of getting to see him in person?

I thought it would be a little scarier, but he’s just a very normal person in real life. He’s very committed to being an actor. And while we were discussing, I could definitely tell that whole time, he’s very deep into what this character is, how this will work. There was a little bit of that surrealness to be talking to actual Pennywise right there. But I think it was grounded in how much that was just based in regular old acting, which I had been doing for this whole time. It didn’t feel all too crazy in the moment.

What are you looking forward to, now that, obviously, Matty is no longer with us, going in the back half and the last few episodes? What are you looking forward to seeing from the aftermath of all of this?

Well, I am greatly disappointed we don’t have any more episodes that I get to be … jumping around. But I’m excited to see the real climax of this. They’ve got a lot that they’re cooking up, and that the plot lines have started to build to about what the military is doing, what else is going for. There’s some real big, actual, more Bill Skarsgård in there. There’s only so much I can say. But all the plot lines they’ve been building, I think they’re going to have a lot of meat and a lot of climax and a lot of finishing what they’ve started that I just really want to start seeing.

Welcome to Derry, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO