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Comic books and horror go together like questionably chunky peanut butter and runny, blood-red jelly, and actor Bill Skarsgård soon have feet in both camps again after previously appearing in Deadpool 2 (and later Eternals) in between Pennywise performances in Andy Muschietti’s IT films. Fans can almost definitely expect to see Pennywise’s return in IT: Welcome to Derry Season 2, which HBO boss swears is still in the cards despite the lack of a renewal, and he’s now also rumored for a major X-Men role in the MCU.
Let’s first put our attention on Skarsgård’s potential return to Marvel before shifting over to IT: Welcome to Derry co-creator Muschietti’s latest update about Season 2, which already sounds more dire and dismal than anything the X-Men might be dealing with in Jake Schreier’s impending movie.
Bill Skarsgård Is Rumored To Be Up For Major X-Men Role
The box office-shattering release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day pointed audiences to the MCU’s future with presumed set-ups for Avengers sequels Doomsday and Secret Wars, as well as a potential X-Men feature. That release followed many weeks of rumor mill fodder targeting actors allegedly being primed to play rebooted mutants, from Adam Driver as Magneto to Anya Taylor-Joy reportedly being tapped for Magik. With Samara Weaving now seemingly confirmed to play Emma Frost, fans can possibly look forward to an uptick in legitimate updates.
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Enter Bill Skarsgård, who is reportedly up for contention to portray the X-Men’s guiding light of a leader, Charles Xavier. This rumor comes from Jeff Sneider’s The Insneider, which has a good enough track record at this point that the rumor shouldn’t be immediately dismissed.
Though perhaps not the most obvious choice to portray the genius telepath on the big screen, Skarsgård has certainly proven himself capable of falling into roles with extensive makeup and prosthetics. Not just with Pennywise, but also with the 2024 films Nosferatu and The Crow. And just before those, he starred in the bonkers action flick Boy Kills World, so he’s also well-versed in over-the-top action sequences just in the past few years.
Interestingly, the other actor reportedly in consideration for Professor X is Tom Pelphrey, who’s seemingly made just as many headlines for being Kaley Cuoco‘s hubby for his acclaimed roles in dark dramas like Ozark and Task. I don’t know that I’ve seen him deliver any performances as nuanced as Bill Skarsgård, so if that’s what Jake Schreier & Co. are looking for with the new Xavier, I think he’ll be the go-to pick. Assuming the rumors are even true in the first place.
What IT: Welcome To Derry’s Creator Is Saying About Season 2
To jump from rumors to words straight from a TV creator’s mouth, let’s pull focus over to the newest IT: Welcome to Derry update from EP and director Andy Muschietti, who revealed to Variety that the writers room is going full-steam ahead, and that they’re working hard to bring the second season’s 1935 timeline to life, even if it doesn’t sound like the most lively setting. As he put it:
There’s gonna be a lot of that depression-era hustling in the air in our characters. Everybody’s trying to get by and survive the circumstances. They are gonna do crazy things. And of course, the social, cultural, horrible things that were happening in the era, too. We’re not going to skip those. [They are the] very center and the heart of our story.
As previously revealed and hinted at in the IT: Welcome to Derry opening titles for Season 1, the second chapter will center partly on the Stephen King novel’s interlude about the Bradley Gang Massacre that turned the small town upside down. The group of outlaws are on the run from the FBI when they take temporary shelter in Derry, where its members do all kinds of looting, killing and then some.
Those actions speak to the “trying to get by and survive” bit of Muschietti’s tease. As if occasional cycles of pure evil weren’t enough, the locals gotta deal with roughneck criminals as well? Sheesh.
Andy Muschietti described more of the desolate times that Welcome to Derry‘s characters will experience in Season 2, saying:
In this case, on the surface, Derry is a graveyard almost. It’s a carcass of something because people are depleted, poor, tired, jobless, homeless. The kids don’t have a suburban, comforting life. They’re in a very different situation. Some of them are orphans or runaways, and so the environment is pretty bleak. But there’s always the aspect of hope that is always there, burning, and it’s what keeps our new group going.
No details were shared about the new group of characters, but he did fully confirm that “there’s a family tree that appears” in Season 2 that will serve as a direct connection to the two IT features and/or the first season, which already set up Marge as the biological mother of Richie. Will we spent time with Marge’s parents when they were kids, or will the connections only tie into other characters? Considering the Hanlon family moved to Derry around the time of IT’s 1962 cycle, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see any more of that family’s relatives in the show’s future.
I can’t wait to see IT: Welcome to Derry join all the other upcoming horror TV shows that I’ll be shoving my face in front of as the months go by. But in the meantime, Season 1 is available to stream via HBO Max subscription.