It: Welcome to Derry is a direct prequel to Andy Muschietti’s It and It Chapter Two. So it’s not surprising that Muschietti and the rest of the team behind the HBO series brought back some familiar names and faces—other than Pennywise, of course—along the way.
Earlier in the season, fans learned the backstory of doomed clown Bob Gray and his daughter, Ingrid. After losing her father to Pennywise, Ingrid stayed in Derry, got a job at Juniper Hill Asylum, and married the local butcher. She became Ingrid Kersh and was played in Derry’s main timeline of 1962 by Madeleine Stowe.
Fans of It Chapter Two sat up tall when Ingrid’s last name was revealed in episode five: Kersh, as in Mrs. Kersh, the creepy old lady-slash-Pennywise disguise (played by Joan Gregson) that Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) encounters during a return trip to Derry? Yes. It’s her, in a manner of speaking. And we know this because of what was revealed about Ingrid’s later years in It: Welcome to Derry‘s finale, the cheekily titled “Winter Fire.”
In “Winter Fire,” we see that Ingrid becomes a permanent Juniper Hill resident after encountering Pennywise—after seeking him out and doing some awful things to tempt him into appearing—and realizing, once and for all, he was not her father anymore. She also got blasted with the Deadlights, which will turn anyone’s head around.
The show then fast-forwards 26 years, and Ingrid Kersh meets the young Beverly Marsh—whose mother is a fellow patient, recently deceased—at Juniper Hill. They lock eyes in the finale’s final moments, and the teenage character is played by Sophia Lillis, Ms. “Winter Fire” herself from the It movies.
Speaking to Variety, Andy Muschietti and Barbara Muschietti, co-creators of It: Welcome to Derry‘s along with Jason Fuchs, explained that Lillis’ cameo was added very late. In fact, Andy said, it was when they were doing “reshoots and pick-ups before the edit.” (Andy directed “Winter Fire,” which was written by Fuchs.)
“I had an idea for a four-scene epilogue, but it was a little too ambitious, so we condensed it to one scene with just one of the Losers [Club]. We always joke that Sophia Lillis always looks the same. She looked 14 when she was 14 and now that she’s 24, she still looks 14, so we could bring her back without having to de-age her,” Andy said. “We also brought back the actress who plays the elderly Ingrid Kersh, Joan Gregson, in It Chapter 2. We wanted to show that those characters had met before, so in the flash-forward, we have Kersh still committed at Juniper Hill, the same place where Beverly’s mom was committed. It seemed like the perfect connection.”
Gregson passed away a few months later at the age of 91, according to Barbara Muschietti, but her presence in Derry proves crucial to season one’s ending—as well as It lore of the future.
“What I love about that scene is that it does change your understanding of Beverly’s encounter with It’s manifestation of Mrs. Kersh in It Chapter 2,” Fuchs explained. “I was lucky enough to work on that scene and, at the time, I imagined that It was taking the guise of Pennywise’s daughter in order to prey on Beverly’s traumatic relationship with her own father. It did not, then, occur to me that Beverly Marsh had ever met the real Mrs. Kersh.”
However, he added, “But now, you go back and rewatch that scene, and you realize It was up to something else. It knows that Beverly actually met Mrs. Kersh at least once and it was on the worst day of her life, the day her mother committed suicide. So, when It takes that form, it’s also a way of tapping into a long-buried memory that’s intertwined with the most horrific moment, to that point, of Beverly’s young life. And that’s the day, the moment, we get to see at the end of our season.”
You can watch all of It: Welcome to Derry season one on HBO and HBO Max.
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