Chris Chalk, Stephen Rider, Jovan Adepo, and Taylour Paige on HBO’s eerie new horror series.
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.
