It’s been a little quiet on the IT front, as the movie prepares for a launch this september. But we have some cool news from actor Bill Skarsgård who gave us a little insight into the filming process thanks to an exclusive interview for INTERVIEW magazine.

“Holy shit. What am I doing?”

Bill’s elder brother, Alexander, took the time to grab his brother between busy schedules, to chat about Bill’s career. Between sibling jibes and gentle joshing, Bill told how his IT persona terrorfied some of the kids on set, enough to make one of them cry.

ALEXANDER: Does it feel good knowing that kids around the world for decades to come will have nightmares about you?

BILL: It’s a really weird thing to go, “If I succeed at doing what I’m trying to do with this character, I’ll traumatize kids.” On set, I wasn’t very friendly or goofy. I tried to maintain some sort of weirdness about the character, at least when I was in all the makeup. At one point, they set up this entire scene, and these kids come in, and none of them have seen me yet. Their parents have brought them in, these little extras, right? And then I come out as Pennywise, and these kids—young, normal kids—I saw the reaction that they had. Some of them were really intrigued, but some couldn’t look at me, and some were shaking. This one kid started crying. He started to cry and the director yelled, “Action!” And when they say “action,” I am completely in character. So some of these kids got terrified and started to cry in the middle of the take, and then I realized, “Holy shit. What am I doing? What is this? This is horrible.”

“This was the really scary one!”

As we have seen from promotional stills and the Trailers, Pennywise the Dancing Clown is looking terrifying. A far cry from Tim Curry’s standard clown look, the modern take is a twisted effigy of a clown. Created by makeup effects specialist Tom Woodruff Jr. and Emmy-winning costume designer Janie Bryant, Skarsgård’s look on film will give many people some restless nights, and Bills ok with that. The original 1990 TV-Mini-series still scares people decades later, Skarsgård’s hoping the new IT will be doing the same for generations to come.

I remember It being the scariest thing that existed for a kid. There were other horror films, like Friday the 13th or Halloween, but this was the really scary one because it was children and a clown. So many people go, “That film really destroyed my childhood,” or, “I hated clowns after that.” Hopefully, there will be a lot of 10-year-olds who will be traumatized forever based on my performance.

Gather your friends and head for the sewers.. IT is coming SEPTEMBER 8th.