**IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 4 Features Its Most Grotesque Pennywise Haunting Yet**
*Spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 4, now streaming on HBO Max*
About halfway through *IT: Welcome to Derry* Episode 4, Lilly Bainbridge’s (Clara Stack) bespectacled best friend, Marge Truman (Matilda Lawler), experiences a nightmare come to life. Her eyes begin to bulge out like disembodied slugs from behind her glasses, triggering a gruesome series of events that will leave viewers haunted.
One of the rare positive developments so far in *IT: Welcome to Derry* has been the formation of a new “Loser’s Club” — a group of kids bonded together by their shared fight against Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård). “Looney” Lilly Bainbridge now counts Ronnie Grogan (Amanda Christine), Will Hanlon (Blake Cameron James), and Rich Santos (Arian S. Cartaya) as friends and allies. All have witnessed the horrors Lilly has faced and actually believe her. The kids are beginning to hang out together both in school and around Derry.
However, not everyone is happy about this. Marge, who until now has been Lilly’s only friend, starts to feel threatened. In Episode 4, Marge joins forces with the school’s mean clique, the Pattie Cakes, to humiliate Lilly. She tells Lilly that a cute and popular boy has a crush on her and convinces her to approach him — but in reality, he does not. The Pattie Cakes orchestrate this scenario to make Lilly the laughingstock of the cafeteria, evoking memories of another Stephen King classic, *Carrie*.
Before Lilly can make her move, she retreats to the bathroom to collect herself. Worried she might back out, the Pattie Cakes coerce Marge to follow Lilly and ensure the plan’s success. Yet, at the last moment, Marge’s conscience gets the better of her, and she begins to tell Lilly the truth — just as Pennywise strikes.
In the very first episode of *IT: Welcome to Derry*, Marge worried that her new glasses made her eyes look too large. Now, in Episode 4, her eyes physically threaten to overtake her face. Overwhelmed by pain and panic, Marge runs through the school halls toward the shop classroom, where she desperately tries to cut her massive, grotesquely moving eyes from her face.
When DECIDER spoke to the young stars of *IT: Welcome to Derry*, they admitted to sharing Lilly’s shock at Marge’s decision to try and remove her own eyes. “No. I had the same reaction,” Matilda Lawler confessed. “I was like, ‘Girl, please, please, please, no!’ But it was honestly a blast to film that.”
Lawler, known for her spellbinding work on HBO Max’s *Station Eleven* and *The Gilded Age* Season 2, revealed that part of shooting that intense sequence made her feel “a little bit ridiculous.”
“The way that we filmed it, I was wearing like a half head of prosthetics,” she explained. “So I had this prosthetic piece that they put on, and then they attached little wires into the hole where my eye—or the prosthetic eye—should be, and the wires just stuck out.”
“I was basically running down hallways, screaming, crying over these wires coming out of my eyes. Yeah, I guess if a stranger saw that, they might question my mental sanity.”
Despite the oddness of the process, Lawler thinks it was all worth it. “I love how the CGI looks, and it was just a blast at the end with Clara coming in. We got to have a really good time with all the blood spraying on me and the physical action of her trying to rip it out of my hand. I just remember that being an intense but very fun scene.”
Her commitment did not go unnoticed by her co-stars, who affectionately refer to her as “Tilly.” Blake Cameron James praised her dedication, saying, “I’ll say something about Tilly: She commits to her character not only probably more than any child actor I’ve ever worked with, but any adult actor or actress I’ve ever worked with. Like, she really, really, really gets in and commits 100%. That’s a skill.”
So if you found yourself squirming in horror during that scene, you can thank Matilda Lawler’s intense commitment to the role for making it so frightfully effective.
https://decider.com/2025/11/16/it-welcome-to-derry-episode-4-matilda-lawler-breaks-down-marges-grotesque-eye-horror-scene-i-was-like-girl-please-please-please-no/
