It is Inverse’s sad, unsavory duty to inform our readers that people want to have sex with the ageless, shapeshifting demon from Andy Muschietti’s new adaptation of It when he appears in the form of Pennywise the Clown.
We wish it wasn’t so, but it is. It is. The origin of this desire seems to stem primarily from the actor, Bill Skarsgård, who plays Pennywise. Skarsgård is best known for his role on the Netflix original series Hemlock Grove, and for being a member of the scary, beautiful Skarsgård clan, a family of Swedish actors including brother Alexander and father Stellan.
Before It even premiered nationwide on September 5, people were preemptively hot for Pennywise based on Skarsgård’s casting alone.
Once the movie was finally released, things began to spiral. Some people seemed to feel ambivalent about their attraction to Skarsgård/Pennywise, the clown who kills children and whose face opens to reveal eternity and rows upon rows of gleaming, needle-like teeth.
This realm of thought is understandable. Bill Skarsgård is attractive by conventional metrics: he’s symmetrical, tall, cheekbone-y, etcetera. But other people were graphically, balls-to-the-wall down to hop on some spooky clown dick. One user even drew rudimentary Pennywise makeup onto a regular picture of Bill Skarsgard. That’s right, he wasn’t even a clown in that picture until they made him a clown.
But making the sewer-dwelling child killer a sex symbol is not a priority for everyone online, and there has been backlash in response to the Pennywise lovefest.
No matter how desperately we wish this online affection could be gradually erased from our memory for the next 27 years, with an It sequel on the horizon it’s likely that this crush is here to stay.
