Original ‘IT’ Miniseries Makeup Designer Commends 2017 Incarnation of Pennywise

Almost three decades after its debut, the original live-action adaptation of Stephen King‘s IT remained a beloved miniseries, thanks in large part to Tim Curry’s performance as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Last year’s adaptation went on to become one of the most successful movies of the year, with Bill Skarsgård seemingly doing a good enough job as Pennywise for fans to not compare him to Curry. Even the makeup designer for the miniseries, Bart Mixon, recently shared his seal of approval for the incarnation of the character, detailing the different approaches for the makeup design.

“It was cool. I’m certainly fond of mine, but I thought they did a nice job,” Mixon shared with House of Tortured Souls. “I did get to apply that one day for the promotional thing, and there were certainly some similarities to my makeup which probably couldn’t be avoided [with] it being a clown, but I thought it was different enough. I don’t envy [Bill] Skarsgård just having to follow Tim Curry. That must be a pretty daunting task for him, but yeah, I thought it was interesting as a makeup.”

The 1990 miniseries production was limited with time and budget, resulting in relatively primitive effects. Last year’s adaptation had a much larger budget, allowing effects to be taken to a higher level.

“I’m glad they did their own take on it, that they didn’t just copy mine even though I have friends that thought they copied it a little too much,” Mixon shared. “I guess it has the bulbous head like mine, but that’s where the similarities end. Just as a movie, I thought they did a pretty good job. Mine was a TV movie from 1990; theirs is an R-rated feature in 2017, so obviously they can do stuff we weren’t allowed to do.”

While Mixon is proud of his work on the miniseries, he’s still envious of the larger scale of the feature film.

“For what I did, I think it was about three hours and five minutes long,” Mixon pointed out. “By the time they do part two, it will probably come into about four and a half hours to cover the same territory, so I am kind of envious that they got another hour and a half to tell the same story and they are not restricted by the 1990 TV censorship as I was. But I’m really looking forward to part two. I got a lot of crap on mine for the spider at the end of ours, so I’m kind of curious to see what they do or if they are even going to do a spider, or if they are gonna chicken out and not do it at all.”

The film’s production didn’t go entirely smoothly, as it lost its original director and original Pennywise actor early on in development, signaling trouble for the final product. With the film going on to cross $700 million worldwide, we’re sure the next chapter will be bigger and better.

You can grab IT on Blu-ray now. The film’s sequel will hit theaters on September 6, 2019.

[H/T House of Tortured Souls]