Taylour Paige Wanted Charlotte to Get the Hell Out of Derry, Too

Spoilers ahead for It: Welcome to Derry through the season finale, “Winter Fire,” which premiered on HBO on December 14.

Familiar Stephen King characters Leroy Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk), and Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) populate the first season of It: Welcome to Derry, but the show also introduces Leroy’s wife, Charlotte Hanlon, played by Zola and The Toxic Avenger star Taylour Paige — and how lucky for everyone that she was there. Over the course of eight episodes, Charlotte established herself as the sharpest and most logical person on the show, the kind of voice of reason that functions as an audience surrogate for horror stories while also working to keep the other characters alive.

Forced to leave their home in Shreveport, Louisiana, and her civil-rights advocacy behind, Charlotte arrives in Derry apprehensive about the lily-white town and unsettling vibes that seem to blanket everything. In addition to trying to hold her family together as Leroy embarks on a top-secret military mission and son Will (Blake Cameron James) faces his own battle against the town’s evil, she finds meaning in working to exonerate Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider), who has been railroaded into a murder charge by Derry’s racist police force. In the season finale, Charlotte’s efforts pay off as she’s finally able to help Hank escape to freedom. She also deserves some credit for Leroy and Will surviving the final showdown with Pennywise mostly unscathed. Paige laughs about Charlotte’s position as the only sensible person in Derry. “It’s a little frustrating, isn’t it?” she asks. But when it comes to being rational on a show like Welcome to Derry, she muses, “Somebody’s got to do it.”

I know you’re not a horror person. Did you do any crash course in the mythology of It prior to filming?
No, I didn’t. I was focused on Charlotte being the odd man out, so to speak — the woman who comes to this town via her husband and is trying her best to keep the family together. I built her reacting to her environment for the first time. She has this sacral sense that something’s really, really off, that something’s very strange about this town. It’s already a weird time to be alive. It’s 1962, so the country is not at rest. She’s coming from the crazy South and then gets here and it’s quiet compared to where they come from, but it feels even louder.

You self-identify as a scaredy-cat, which I imagine was also something you could use in your performance.
Being a human being, there is a lot to be afraid of already in the world. I worked with that. And obviously, 1962 is a really great texture to work with as a Black woman. I wanted Charlotte to be as specific and as honest as possible — working from her feet up, from the way one would walk, the carefulness of the pronunciation, the starched clothing, the being lonely. She was unraveling quietly. It all makes for a very complex, uncomfortable existence.

You’ve said you were inspired by your grandmother in playing Charlotte. Can you talk about what you drew from her?
My grandmother was such a singular, hilarious southern woman, a southern lady who had a lot of faith. She’s very complicated. My grandmother didn’t raise any of her daughters and had my mom really young. In many ways, she wasn’t, I don’t think, very maternal, but what I did take from her was, she was always looking up and out. She was a really interesting observer. She had been through a lot because she was born in the late 1930s.

I love my grandmother as a person, not as her role as grandmother or mother — just the person she was. She had a lot of opinions and a really strong point of view, and she had a really funny way of pronouncing things. Her voice would change if we were at Kroger or her pharmacy versus when this sweet man would help her in her condo. In episode two with Charlotte, there’s that whole montage of her walking through and observing her environment, and you could hear her even though she’s not speaking. I always hear my grandmother. She was so Lucille Ball funny. The show is serious and it’s genre, but I wanted there to be a little bit of humor in Charlotte. When Charlotte was quietly observing something, I wanted you to feel like you could hear her say, “What the fuck is this shit?”

She’s someone who can come in and pretty immediately see the town for what it is, while almost all the other adults in Derry overlook the darkness. What gives her that insight?
It’s being a Black woman. It’s being a mother. I now can speak to being a mother — I wasn’t a mother when we were filming, but I guess I felt like my baby was close by. What has happened to me in real life that I can now speak to in Charlotte is that when you become a parent, specifically a mother, there’s this instinct that kicks in. There’s this deepening of knowing. Sometimes there’s no reason. You don’t know why you know things; you just feel it and act. You are a protector of, now, a heart that lives outside of your chest.

We’ve never seen someone in this universe who cares as much as Charlotte does about injustice. How did you work through what her life looked like before coming to Derry?
It wasn’t necessarily always on the page, but I definitely created the Charlotte that I thought she was. She was teaching back in Shreveport, and I thought about how, if you’re ripped away from that — we’re moving to this town because my husband has to be on this base — you feel like your work isn’t complete, like you have more to offer the world. I think about what that would be like as she’s cleaning the bathrooms and clearing the trash, when she’s at the grocery store ruminating and reflecting alone. There’s only so many calls one can make back home.

The white residents of Derry keep telling her, “This isn’t the South.” Maybe that’s intended to reassure her, but it sounds more insidious as the show goes on. How did you interpret that? Charlotte experienced extreme racism in the South, but at the same time there was maybe more of a sense of community there.
I have this funny conversation recorded with my grandmother. I asked her a lot about growing up in America in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s. My grandmother had this very interesting take, which was that she thought segregation was better at one point. I know that sounds crazy, but this is someone who lived it and this was her opinion. She said Black people were stronger. She’s like, We were all in the community, rich, poor, we were all together. And then the white folks came and got in our brains, and we got divided. We had our own doctors and dentists and people had pharmacies. You weren’t allowed to go over there so you had to build your own. And of course, a lot of things were burned down, a lot of things were sabotaged, but I could understand that point of view and respect it.

The voice I would hear when doing those scenes was, “It’s not the South, but this is America.” Let’s not get it twisted. We know our history. We know what this country was built on. I know what it feels like to walk here, to be here. I know what it feels like to be looked at this way and feel like you’re smarter than your husband and still have to take a back seat or swallow your intuition because that’s the way the world works. All of that was building for Charlotte. 

One of the most compelling threads of the season is Charlotte’s crusade to free Hank Grogan. Where does she find that fearlessness to stand up to the Derry Police Department and refuse to be turned away?
Crazy! You know, you had MLK, Rosa Parks, and all these people who were willing to put their life on the line for a better world. With Charlotte, I feel two things. A lot comes with being bored. That’s my human answer. I think, literally, Charlotte was bored. She’s like, I’m fucking sitting in this house in this fucked-up, weird town. I’m gonna go do something. But also, There’s only one other Black family in the town, and I have resources, and that’s a brother, that’s someone’s child. This isn’t right. It’s both. I don’t know which one first, but I definitely worked from the idea of her both being bored and feeling very subtly resentful toward her husband for having her here in the first place. She felt like, Well, you can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the girl.

In the finale, Leroy talks about the incredible bond between mother and son, and you really feel that connection between Charlotte and Will. How did you build a maternal rapport with Blake Cameron James?
He’s such a sweet boy. He called me “ma’am” and “Miss Taylour,” and I’m like, “I’m young! You don’t have to call me Miss Taylour!” I really tried to be who I needed when I was 12. We hung out, we went to the mall in Toronto, we went to eat. I have such a soft spot in general for children. I would ask him, “What are you listening to? Who are your friends? What’s Alabama like?”

Charlotte and Leroy have such an interesting relationship. There’s real chemistry there, but it’s also very fraught. Aside from what was on the page, how did you find that balance of love and resentment with Jovan Adepo?
Jovan has become a really good friend. We bickered a lot and would give each other a bit of a hard time. Jovan and I work really differently, and I think those qualities actually made Charlotte and Leroy feel familiar so that you did feel like they were married.

Funny enough, in many ways, we were our characters. My voice of reason is, like, Lighten up. We’re on the show, and it’s challenging, and we want to do good work, and, you know, it’s not real. We’re arguing because it’s the show’s function. We were bickering about some of the words. He’s like, “Why are they fighting again?” And I’m like, “Oh, did you think it was going to be butterflies and rainbows? We’re on a genre horror show. We literally are a function of the story.”

I have to believe Charlotte and Leroy’s relationship gets better after the season ends, now that he’s out of the military. I’m imagining a better future for them, at least for a while.
That would be nice. It’s funny because obviously, they stay, and that was — me, Taylour, I was like, What? But I also think that in 1962, that’s what you do. You smile and get back to your duties, cooking and planning holidays. You do what you have to do. That’s maybe why all of us are here today, because somebody’s grandmother or great-grandmother said, “I’m staying,” and continued to have kids. The grandmother, the mother, the matriarch, held it all together.

I appreciate that perspective, because her deciding to stay is the most surprising part of the finale.
Listen, I definitely wanted her to get out. I was like, “Can she leave?” I even thought, “What if you have a scene of her driving out of Derry and you see a sign that says, ‘Welcome to Derry’?” Like, you just can’t leave. But I was like, “I just don’t see her out of her own volition wanting to stay.” The only way I was able to justify it was by putting it in a place where I thought, Well, we’re all here because someone’s family member kept it inside, kept it together, and stayed.