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Following It: Welcome to Derry's big season 1 finale, star Taylour Paige has admitted she "wanted more" for her character Charlotte Hanlon.
*Warning! Spoilers below for It: Welcome to Derry episode 8. If you're not up to date, turn back now*
After sending Bill Skarsgård's Pennywise back into his 27-year hibernation, Rose, the Grogans, and Dick Hallorann all make plans to leave the titular town. The Hanlons, however, decide to stick around and take over the former's farm, despite Leroy's earlier protestations. "Maybe the next damn fool mission needs to be together," Charlotte tells her husband with a smile, suggesting that the family will be Derry's new protectors.
For Paige, it was hard to imagine Charlotte would've made such a choice after all they've gone through. "I'm not happy with the way this was written, if I'm being honest," she recently told Deadline in a post-mortem interview. "I'm like, 'There's no f*cking way.' I mean, I guess the lore is that you forget when you're in Derry, but I don't buy it."
Paige went on to say that she "wanted more" for Charlotte, Leroy, and their son, Will, even though she understands that a woman electing to "get back to business" as a homemaker makes some sense within a period context. "I think it would have been maybe too radical for Charlotte to leave," she noted. "And also too radical for women of 1962 to be like, 'I'm out.' That was very rare. It just didn't really happen then, right? Most people stayed in loveless marriages. Most women, I think, had to deny themselves to keep the family together."
While Paige wasn't super satisfied with how Charlotte's story concludes (we're unlikely to see her again if It: Welcome to Derry season 2 is greenlit, due to the fact that it'll be set 27 years earlier), she was super into Charlotte's mother-son scenes. She liked the character's subplot with Hank Grogan, who she helped after he was wrongly accused of committing the movie theater murders, too.
"I think, being a mother – at least I can speak to it now after, I wasn't a mother when I was shooting -- but I think becoming a mother gives you these superpowers, and this super kind of compassion," she explained. "That was a nice way to kind of get a little bit of more of Charlotte's inner world and the way that she thinks, and what she believes in, kind of gives you a little bit more color than just like, she’s at home cooking, stewing."
It: Welcome to Derry is streaming now on HBO Max. For more, check out our picks of the most exciting new TV shows heading our way or our deep-dive into this year's many Stephen King adaptations.
