re: Cast IT Chapter 2

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Director Andy Muschietti (best known for Mama, a film King himself named in EW as one of his favorites of 2013) says the second film will still feature the younger kids we’ve come to know and love. They turn up as memories of the adult versions of the Losers Club.

“On the second movie, that dialogue between timelines will be more present,” he said. “If we’re telling the story of adults, we are going to have flashbacks that take us back to the ‘80s and inform the story in the present day.”

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“The hope is we’ll find the best way soon, because it’s also important for Andy to get flashbacks with the kids, who are growing very fast,” she says. “They are an important component in the next film.”

Andy Muschietti stresses that the kid elements in Chapter Two won’t just be brief throwbacks, but integral to the events that unfold for the adults. “They’re a very big part of the action,” he says.

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Hanlon is physically one of the strongest of the Losers when they’re kids, and demonstrates a loyalty and fearlessness that inspires the others. But Andy Muschietti said he will pay a high price for his devotion, one that weakens him mentally and physically by the time the others return.

While King’s Hanlon was a mild-mannered librarian, collecting and recording details for their town’s bloody history, the movie’s version of Mike will turn out to have a heartbreaking history of his own – much of it fallout from immersing himself in the study of that nameless evil dwelling beneath.

“My idea of Mike in the second movie is quite darker from the book,” the filmmaker said. “I want to make his character the one pivotal character who brings them all together, but staying in Derry took a toll with him. I want him to be a junkie actually. A librarian junkie. When the second movie starts, he’s a wreck.”

Muschietti said he wanted to “infuse more agency to him in those 30 years we don’t visit.”

“He’s not just the collector of knowledge of what Pennywise has been doing in Derry. He will bear the role of trying to figure out how to defeat him. The only way he can do that is to take drugs and alter his mind.”

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Hanlon’s mind-altering exploration mirrors a part of King’s novel that was cut from the first movie, when the Loser kids undertake a Native American ritual to get a glimpse of the supernatural plane, bringing them into contact with entities that help them stop the creature behind Pennywise.

“It resonates with what the kids do when they go to the smokehouse in the Barrens,” Andy Muschietti says. “By inhaling these fumes from the fire they have visions of It, and the origin of It, and the falling fire in the sky that crashed into Derry millions of years ago. We’ve brought that to Mike, by the end of those 30 years Mike has figured out the Ritual of Chüd.”

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