It: Welcome to Derry will be floating into your nightmares very soon, and while the kids—Pennywise’s favorite feast—will be front and center, adult characters also take a prominent role in the story. Most folks we meet have been created for the HBO series, which is set in 1962 and is a prequel to the events of the It movies. But every Stephen King fan who’s ever checked into the Overlook Hotel knows Dick Hallorann.
Chris Chalk (The Newsroom, Shining Girls) plays the psychically gifted character—most famously seen in The Shining—in It: Welcome to Derry. As he told io9 at a recent HBO press day, he’s well aware of the legacy crafted by Scatman Crothers—who memorably portrayed Hallorann in the 1980 Stanley Kubrick movie—as well as Carl Lumbly (in 2019’s Doctor Sleep) and Melvin Van Peebles (in the 1997 Shining miniseries). But he’s here to present his own interpretation of the character.
“In order to create and manifest this version of Dick Halloran, I did observe those performances, but I didn’t—’study’ is too strong a word, because that’s not what we’re doing,” Chalk said. “If we were doing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in 2025, then I’m going to study that performance in a different way, but all I have to do is see who he is now and break him down backwards to who he was in an earlier time, and then it becomes about creative freedom and the text. So it’s awesome to have all of these options of people who’ve had their versions of the performance, but just as they had their version, I knew I was going to get my version. Nobody asked me to mimic anybody.”
The younger version of Hallorann that we meet in It: Welcome to Derry is an airman stationed at the Air Force base just outside of town. This particular military installation has a fenced-off “Special Projects” area, where Hallorann’s abilities are pressed into service by General Shaw (James Remar). No spoilers on what they’re trying to accomplish, but Hallorann gets certain privileges due to his unique importance to the mission. The drawback is, all those mental gymnastics take a painful toll.
“I think the fact that Dick is even participating in this [mission] is proof that he’ll do anything to not be trapped,” Chalk said. “The worst thing he could possibly do to himself, he has to ultimately do in order to escape this idea of being trapped by General Shaw. He has to essentially assault himself and reopen trauma and reopen trauma and reopen trauma. But he wants to escape it so bad that he’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll cut myself if it’ll get me out of this.’ It’s a great thing to get to play a person at their weakest, most fragile, and most desperate points. Like, that’s what we want: to get to dig into the depths of a human.”
Elsewhere in the story, we encounter Hank Grogan, played by Stephen Rider (Daredevil, Luke Cage). He’s the single dad of young Ronnie (Amanda Christine) and the projectionist at Derry’s downtown movie theater. Early in It: Welcome to Derry, he’s dragged into some messy drama that ties into the show’s examination of America, circa 1962—a place full of problems even when there’s not a demonic clown in the picture.
Hank is a new character, but Rider had a lot of reference points even without pages from a King novel to consider.
“The thing about backstory is, it’s not like you’re going to tell it,” he explained. “It’s more about being very clear on his point of view and the world that he comes from and what he values. The fact that it’s the 1960s and he grew up in the 1920s and 1930s and where his parents came from, in terms of even slavery—it’s a lot to draw on. And most of us came up, or our parents came up, through the Great Migration. So there were a lot of things that I had access to. But backstories are tricky because they can become very fantastical. So if all of a sudden I’m like, ‘What do I do with this? It sounds good, but I don’t know what I’m doing with this.’ So I had to make sure it served Hank, not just Stephen’s fantastical world.”
More newcomers in It: Welcome to Derry are played by Jovan Adepo (3 Body Problem, The Leftovers) and Taylour Paige (The Toxic Avenger), though their last name is one It fans will recognize: Hanlon. As the show begins, Major Leroy Hanlon has just been transferred to Derry, with his wife, Charlotte, and their son, Will (Blake James), in tow.
Major Hanlon, we soon learn, has a quality that would be unique in any context, but it’s especially intriguing in a haunted place like Derry: he is literally a man without fear.
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