In an interview with ScreenRant‘s Grant Hermanns for IT: Welcome to Derry, Fuchs explains how he and fellow co-creators Andy and Barbara Muschietti approached fleshing out Gray’s backstory, which has been largely untouched until now.
Fuchs and the Muschiettis were concerned about providing answers for a story that was meant to be left mysterious. With King being a partner and collaborator on the series, though, they were able to ask his opinion on the matter. This led to them confidently telling the story of Gray, clarifying his connection to Mrs. Kersh, and revealing why IT is drawn to the clown form.
Well, it’s how you approach it. If you’re a Stephen King mega fan, like myself, Brad, and the Muschiettis, you do so with a tremendous amount of caution. I think some of the most satisfying things—not just in IT, but in a lot of my favorite novels and genre work—are the mysteries that you don’t have answers to. I’ve sat with the mysteries a bit since I read this book at 11. As a fan and as a constant reader, I love not knowing some of these answers, and yet I also crave the answers.
And so you go, “Well, gosh, if we’re going to try to provide the context of who Bob Gray was, why It chose the form of Pennywise, they better be really satisfying answers. Or else, why bother doing them?” You want to be as bold as Stephen King is in his storytelling; that feels like the right general approach. At the same time, when you’re making these bold swings, you are concerned. “Is this too bold to swing? Does this take us too far from canon? Would Stephen King have done this? Would he approve of it?”
The blessing of having Stephen King as a partner and a collaborator in a show like this is that we don’t have to have those fears go unanswered. We can have the safety net that is Stephen King to go to and say, “Here’s what we’re thinking. What if this is the story? What if this is the reason?” And so, as much as we approached it with excitement and trepidation, we also knew that we had an ace up our sleeves in Stephen King there to tell us if we were we were generally scratching in a direction that felt right to him.
Bob Gray was a classic case of that. Because you think about Bob Gray in the context of the films, it’s very unclear how much is real and how much is not. In the movies, we get the story that IT tells Beverly Marsh in Chapter Two, when it has taken the form of Mrs. Kersh. She’s telling Beverly about her father, the clown, and how he came over. But is that real? Is that a true story, or is that a story IT has made up? Was there really a Bob Gray, or is that a part of the lie altogether? Those are the questions we were interested in.
I think among those questions we were interested in, there was also: Why Pennywise the Dancing Clown? If you think about the choices IT makes, in the context of the manifestations it takes, they’re very specific to the personalized fears of the victim it is preying upon. Well, not everyone’s afraid of clowns. I am, but there must be something beyond the fear component. And it occurred to us that what Georgie is brought in by at the beginning of the book is not fear. Georgie, it seems, has a little concern at the pit of his stomach that this might not go well, but he’s lured in by the presence of Pennywise. It’s attractive to a kid. He’s talking about popcorn and the circus and all these things.
The flashbacks show how children are mesmerized by Gray when he performs as Pennywise Dancing the Clown. IT takes notice of this, even asking Gray why the children are drawn to him before taking the performer into his woods, where he seemingly meets his bloody demise.
Along with IT discovering the perfect form to lure children in, the flashbacks also highlight the touching relationship that Gray has with his daughter, who takes on her deceased mother’s stage name, Periwinkle. This adds more context to Periwinkle growing up to be Mrs. Kersh, who believes for years that IT is her father. She even lures victims to the alien entity, at least until she finally confronts the truth and meets a grim fate during Welcome to Derry episode 7’s ending.
Beyond giving the show’s creative team his approval on fleshing out these details, King has openly supported the show. Welcome To Derry was one of his five recommendations for Halloween, and prior to the release of episode 7, he declared on Threads that “The last two episodes are dynamite.”
This is a significant achievement, as the iconic author has not always been supportive of how his work has been adapted. Most infamously, Stephen King did not like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
