IT Star Bill Skarsgard Drops Out of The Lighthouse Director’s New Film

After his breakout role as Pennywise in both installments of IT, Bill Skarsgard has become a pretty popular actor in the genre movie landscape. Skarsgard has a slew of upcoming projects in the works — but it sounds like he’ll have to drop out of a pretty highly-anticipated one. During a recent interview with Collider, Skarsgard revealed that due to scheduling conflicts tied to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, he will no longer be able to appear in The Northman, the upcoming film from The Lighthouse director Robert Eggers. The film would have seen Skarsgard reunite onscreen with his brother Alexander Skarsgard, in their first project together since 2000’s White Water Fury.

“No, unfortunately. It’s been a scheduling nightmare during COVID,” Skarsgard revealed. “It is what it is. It’s a big shame. Eggers is one of the great filmmakers out there and working with my brother…I don’t want to talk about it, it’s going to make me burst into tears.”

The Northman is set to be a Viking-era revenge tale set in Iceland at the turn of the 10th century, which will star Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, and Anya Taylor-Joy. As Eggers has previously explained, the film will have a different scope and scale from his work on The Lighthouse and The Witch.

“The scale is so huge and there are so many more locations and things that I couldn’t do everything or know every prop myself,” Eggers explained this past April. “That’s been a challenge with the new movie…There’s many locations in the film, so we were constantly going on scouts to find places or reassess places that we have found and we’re building sets there. We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props, training the horses the things they’ll need to do, designing the shots of the films.”

“There’s a lot more storyboarding,” Eggers continued. “Generally I only storyboard the scenes that have visual effects or animals and stunts, things where all the departments need to be on the same page for it to work out. But this movie there is rarely a scene that isn’t on a boat or doesn’t have a lot of extras. We’re storyboarding most of the film, which is taking a lot of time.”

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