SPOILER ALERT: This article contains a minor SPOILER for ‘It: Chapter Two’, so if you haven’t seen it yet, turn back now or proceed with caution.
Much like Stan Lee, Stephen King made a cameo in the latest film to adapt one of his works, ‘It: Chapter Two’. When the now-adult Losers Club split up to gather their various totems to use for the Ceremony of Chüd to banish It for good, Bill (James McAvoy) stumbles across an antique shop with his old bicycle “Silver” in the window. Bill buys the old bike (paying way too much) and “Hi oh Silver” he was away, zipping through the streets of Derry.
But the real highlight of that scene is the appearance of King as the shop owner. After Bill reveals who he is, a bestselling author, King charges him $300 for Silver, saying “You can afford it.” When Bill spies a copy of one of his books on King’s desk, he offers to autograph it, but the shop owner declines, saying “The ending sucked.” (A running gag in the movie.)
Per IGN, King had cautioned director Andy Muschietti about appearing in the movie, because as he stated:
“Well, you have to consider that I’m a jinx. Every movie that I’m in, it bombs.”
In the past, King has made cameos in the films ‘Maximum Overdrive’, the original ‘Pet Sematary’, ‘Sleepwalkers’, ‘Storm of the Century’, and ‘Thinner’, and the TV productions, ‘The Golden Years’, ‘The Stand’, ‘The Langoliers’, ‘The Shining’ (TV miniseries), ‘Kingdom Hospital’, and ‘Under the Dome’.
Muschietti himself made a cameo in the background when adult Eddie goes into his old pharmacy to buy a new asthma inhaler. In addition, Brandon Crane, who played young Ben Hanscom in the 1990 TV miniseries of ‘It’ also appeared as the employee of adult Ben’s architecture company. It’s him that the camera initially seems to hint is the adult version of Ben in the new movie, before Jay Ryan‘s hunky adult Ben is revealed to be observing the meeting via Skype.
‘It: Chapter Two’ is now playing in theaters.
