Stephen King delves deep into the psyches and lives of even his most marginal characters,
which can make adaptations of his stories into a visual medium pretty tricky.
His magnum opus, It, has been brought to both TV and the big screen.
How do the casts stack up?
Float on down and see.
Which came first: the fear of clowns, or Stephen King's monstrous Pennywise?
At this point it almost doesn't matter, since the two are so inextricably linked in the
global consciousness and the nightmares of children and adults alike.
During his first encounter with Georgie Denbrough in the sewer in 1957, Pennywise has yellow
eyes that turn blue as he talks.
King writes,
"The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair
on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-like smile painted over his
mouth.
If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald."
King goes further:
"He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons.
A bright tie, electric-blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white
gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore."
When Ben Hanscom sees the clown shortly after, he is also wearing a "floppy yellow bow-tie"
and notices that "the clown cast no shadow."
25 years later, when Pennywise attacks Adrian Mellon under the bridge, King reiterates earlier
Bozo and Ronald McDonald comparisons, but adds that "later consideration had caused
him to think the clown really looked like neither."
King also describes "great big teeth" like those of a circus lion.
Those definitely made it into the films.
Also known as "Big Bill" and "Stuttering Bill," even to his friends, the unofficial leader
of the Losers Club is described not with the dark brown hair he has in the film, but as
having bright red hair and blue eyes.
After the first attack on Pennywise in the house on Neibolt Street, Bill gives his shirt
to Beverly.
King writes that, when shirtless, Bill had "a narrow chest, the visible track of his
ribs, [and] sunburned freckled shoulders."
Even when they're young, Richie Tozier muses that John F. Kennedy reminds him of Bill.
Older Bill, as depicted in his author photo on the back of one of his novels, is described
as "a bald man wearing glasses."
King writes that "he is tall, and has a certain presence."
Bill is "already balding, already inclining a bit toward fat.
He speaks slowly in company, and at times seems nearly inarticulate."
Another description reads:
"His eyes, magnified by the lenses of his glasses, looked thoughtful."
That part lines up with how older Bill appears in the 1990 It miniseries, played by Richard
Thomas.
But what doesn't fit is, quote, "that red, fine hair that he had begun to lose when he
was only a college sophomore."
Thomas' version of the character not only has hair, but enough of it to pull back into
a ponytail.
While Pennywise the Clown had many, many victims detailed in the pages of King's It, the first
we properly meet is Bill's little brother Georgie.
His physical description is notably sparse - all we know at first is that Georgie is
"a small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes," and he is just six years old.
Much later in the story, as Pennywise's campaign of terror begins ramping up against the Losers
in earnest, King describes Georgie in more detail from a family photo album.
"In [the picture] George was wearing a crew-neck shirt.
His fly-away hair was slicked down with water.
He was grinning, revealing two empty slots in which new teeth would never grow."
As Pennywise uses Georgie's ghost to taunt Bill, he appears with his yellow slicker covered
in blood, as well as his arm missing.
Both movie adaptations of It end up faithfully portraying Bill's little brother, which was
easy to do since he's described so ambiguously.
Like Bill, Beverly has bright red hair that King's novel describes as auburn, coppery,
and deep red, sometimes with blonde highlights, the "dim Irish fire of her hair."
As a young girl her hair was shoulder length, and she wore it pulled back in a ponytail
most of the time.
Beverly has, quote, "gray-blue eyes, naturally red lips, [and] creamy unblemished child's
skin," with "a tiny spray of freckles across her nose."
As a child, her wardrobe is described as cheap sweaters, penny loafers, and ill-fitting tartan
skirts that "probably came from the Salvation Army thrift-box."
Beverly often has huge bruises on her face and arms - the signature of her father's abusive
handiwork.
As an adult, Beverly is described as a "gorgeous woman" with a slim but well-endowed figure.
She's grown her red hair down to her waist and her fingernails are "kept neat but brutally
short."
Shades of these descriptors are evident in all of Beverly's portrayals on screen, except
for the short nails.
As a young man, Mike Hanlon is described as "slim and well built" as well as "fast and
agile," factors that had saved him from several beatings at Henry Bowers' hands.
Mike has a "tight cap of hair," and often wears "corduroys, a tee-shirt, and black high-topped
Keds."
Bill's assessment of Mike when he returns to Derry reveals the extended trauma Mike
has experienced by remaining in the haunted town.
"[Bill] remembered a boy who had been about five feet three, trim, and agile.
Before him was a man who stood about five-seven.
He was skinny.
His clothes seemed to hang on him.
And the lines in his face said he was on the darker side of forty instead of only thirty-eight
or so."
Mike also wears glasses as an adult, and he has a scar across his chest from when the
werewolf form of Pennywise scratched him at Neibolt Street.
His portrayal on screen in the 1990 miniseries is truer to the book than the Muschietti movies,
where Chapter One gives much of his motivation to Ben Hanscom and Chapter Two has him hit
harder by the trauma of his youth.
As a child, Ben Hanscom was described as larger than any of the It adaptations have shown.
King's detailed description paints him as "an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly
the size of New Mexico."
The boys at school bully him for his weight, and King writes that Ben had four baggy sweatshirts
in which to drown his 210-pound body; one brown, one green, and two blue.
Older Ben couldn't be more the opposite of his younger self.
King writes that Ben is "lanky, sunburned, dressed in a chambray shirt, faded jeans,
and a pair of scuffed engineer boots," with "faint squint lines around the corners of
his eyes, but nowhere else."
Basically, somewhere between Clint Eastwood and a Wrangler commercial.
"Wrangler, the authentic Western jeans."
In contrast to his fellow Losers who wear the psychological tolls of their trauma on
their faces, Ben looks "perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was 38."
When the grown-up Losers meet in Derry for dinner, King describes:
"Ben had gotten thin.
[His] clothes clung to a body which was slim and narrow-hipped.
He wore a bracelet with heavy links on one wrist - not gold links but copper ones."
Jay Ryan as older Ben in Chapter Two fits this bill far more than John Ritter did in
the 1990 miniseries.
"Any spare change, mister?"
King's descriptions of young Stanley don't give even a small hint as to how tragically
his story will end.
If anything, he initially seems like one of the most likely characters to make it through
the battle with Pennywise.
King writes,
"As always he looked small, slim, and preternaturally neat - much too neat for a kid who was barely
eleven.
[...] He looked instead like the world's smallest adult.
Then he smiled, and the illusion was broken."
Stan often wears a slicker, and carries his bird book and binoculars with him.
In the brief time we have with older Stan before he takes his last bath, his wife describes
him as "ropy with muscle" with "a hipshot way of walking, a taste for bell-bottomed
jeans on his days off, and the last ghosts of adolescent acne still on his face."
He keeps his black hair short and, like many of the other Losers, wears glasses as an adult.
There are shades of this version in Andy Bean's Stanley in It: Chapter Two, but almost none
at all in the 1990 miniseries.
Like Georgie Denbrough, the physical description of Richie Tozier is surprisingly bare in the
It novel, considering he's one of the key seven characters.
King writes,
"Tozier was a scrawny kid who wore glasses.
[...] His magnified eyes swam behind the thick lenses with an expression of perpetual surprise.
He also had huge front teeth that earned him the nickname Bucky Beaver."
Even older Ritchie only reflects on his appearance about his younger self when he looks in the
mirror:
"He saw a boy who wore glasses, a thin boy with a pale face that had somehow seemed to
scream Hit me!
Go on and hit me!
… Here are my eyes so blue and magnified behind these hateful, hateful glasses, these
horn-rimmed specs one bow of which is held on with adhesive tape."
Finn Wolfhard's glasses in It: Chapter 1 look a lot like that description, except for the
little detail of the tape holding them together - a crucial reminder of exactly how much he
suffers at the hands of Henry Bowers.
Older Richie trades his glasses for contacts, until he returns to Derry and Pennywise starts
messing with his eyes.
But by then he's no longer the odd duck out of the Losers Club with specs; most of the
other Losers wear glasses too.
Thanks to his mother's domineering attitude that constantly has Eddie in and out of the
emergency room, the young boy's face is described as "small and pinched and worried - an old
man's face."
Aging doesn't do Eddie many favors at all.
King describes adult Eddie as:
"...a short man with a timid, rabbity sort of face.
Most of his hair was gone; what was left grew in listless, piebald patches [...] there was
a little snow on Eddie's mountain already."
When they see each other again as grown-ups, Big Bill's assessment of Eddie is just as
harsh.
"Eddie… had grown up to look quite a little bit like Anthony Perkins.
[...] His hair was short, worn in an out-of-date style that had been known as Ivy League in
the late fifties and early sixties.
He was wearing a loud checked sportcoat [...] but the watch on one wrist was Patek Philippe,
and the ring on the little finger of his right hand was a ruby.
The stone was too hugely vulgar and too ostentatious to be anything but real."
In short, Eddie on screen has never looked much like the character on the page.
Pennywise was not the Losers' only nemesis.
That unfortunate honor also goes to Henry Bowers, about whom King writes,
"Henry was a big boy even for twelve.
His arms and legs were thick with farm muscle.
[...] Henry put in at least thirty hours a week hoeing, weeding, planting, digging rocks,
cutting wood, and reaping."
He continues:
"Henry's hair was cut in an angry-looking flattop short enough for the white of his
scalp to show through.
He Butch-Waxed the front with a tube he always carried in the hip pocket of his jeans, and
as a result the hair just above his forehead looked like the teeth of an oncoming power-mower."
Interestingly, Bowers typically wears "a pink motorcycle jacket with an eagle on the back"
- a pink jacket that nobody ever mentions because the one person who did got beat so
badly Henry put him in the hospital.
Henry has black eyes that sparkle, especially when committing violence.
"I'll kill you all.”
“Get some new material, champ."
Years later, after spending most of his adult life in a psychiatric hospital, Bowers had
put on weight, and his skin had, quote, "an unhealthy tallowy hue; sagging."
In the 1990 adaptation, Henry's hair has turned white from the trauma of encountering Pennywise.
But in the Muschietti adaptations, older Henry does resemble the description in King's novel.
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