“I think of him all the time as a smile gone bad—that’s my image for him.”

We were excited to report earlier this week that Tim Curry has signed on to be interviewed for the upcoming doc Pennywise: The Story of IT, and the main source of that excitement is that Curry has seldom talked about the 1990 miniseries over the years. The various home video releases have been bare bones save for a commentary that Curry didn’t take part in, so to hear him talk Pennywise after all these years should be a treat for us all. We cannot wait. But in the meantime, we’ve got a vintage gem to share today that should make that wait a bit more tolerable.

Former Fangoria correspondent Steve Newton, who now runs a blog primarily about music, recently shared a snippet of an audio interview he conducted with Curry on the set of Tommy Lee Wallace’s IT back in 1990. Newton got to share lunch and a quick chat with Curry on the set in Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and we couldn’t possibly be more jealous of him for that.

Newton wrote on his blog, Ear of Newt:

As the Vancouver correspondent for Fangoria magazine back in 1990, when the TV miniseries was shot, I got to go on the set in Stanley Park and hang with Curry while he had lunch, to get the scoop on his role. And quite a scoop it was. Curry doesn’t do that many interviews, and I think Fango was the only publication he talked to about IT. Not one to throw stuff away, I’ve kept almost all of my interviews over the years, and fortunately the cheap-ass, 90-minute, Hong Kong-made cassette I recorded the IT set-visit on still works. So here’s an excerpt of my 20-minute interview with Tim Curry, which begins with me making a major faux pas by calling his character Pennywhistle instead of Pennywise. What a dweeb, eh?

If you’re interested in checking out Newton’s full set report, which appeared in Fangoria Magazine back in 1990, you can read PART ONE and PART TWO over on his blog.

As for the rare vintage audio, you’ll find it below!



