Bill Skarsgård Jokes His Kids Have Heard the Pennywise Voice

Bill Skarsgård says his children have heard his Pennywise voice, and that it comes out when they misbehave. He made the joke on the podcast Happy Sad Confused, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which published the interview on 8 November 2026.

Host Josh Horowitz asked whether the children had heard the voice. Skarsgård said they had, if they were behaving badly. A few days earlier, a Yahoo Entertainment report on the same joke quoted him calling himself a "schizophrenic daddy."

Skarsgård, the Swedish actor, shares two children with his longtime partner, Swedish actress Alida Morberg. He is best known to many audiences for playing the shape-shifting clown in horror films. He first took on the role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown in 2017's It and returned for 2019's It: Chapter Two.

The character has come back to him since then. According to Deadline, he reprised Pennywise in It: Welcome to Derry, where the character was held back until the second half of the series.

Skarsgård has also moved well beyond clowns. He played Count Orlok in Robert Eggers's 2024 film Nosferatu, the vampire role he took on in a very different style of horror.

Asked about future villain parts, he said any new role would need to feel original to him. It would also have to be something he had not done before. That is a plain test, and it points away from repeating Pennywise.

For many viewers, the voice is the character. A parent's joke about using it at bedtime shows how far that sound has travelled from the screen and into family life, even if the joke itself is only that.