Meet the Hanlons! It: Welcome to Derry stars introduce Mike's grandparents and the horrors of the...

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The stars and creator of the prequel series preview the central family at the center of the entity's latest reign of terror. Plus, exclusive photos! Meet the Ha

The stars and creator of the prequel series preview the central family at the center of the entity's latest reign of terror. Plus, exclusive photos!

Meet the Hanlons! It: Welcome to Derry stars introduce Mike's grandparents and the horrors of the 1960s

The stars and creator of the prequel series preview the central family at the center of the entity's latest reign of terror. Plus, exclusive photos!

By Nick Romano

Nick Romano is a senior editor at ** with 15 years of journalism experience covering entertainment. His work previously appeared in *Vanity Fair*, Vulture, IGN, and more.

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October 8, 2025 12:00 p.m. ET

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Jovan Adepo as Leroy Hanlon, Blake Cameron James as Will Hanlon on 'It: Welcome to Derry'. Credit:

Brooke Palmer/HBO Max

- *It: Welcome to Derry* stars Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige join co-creator Any Muschietti to introduce the Hanlon family.

- Adepo drew inspiration from his own father to play the grandpa of Mike Hanlon, describing Leroy as "very compelling, very brave, very family oriented, loving."

- Paige's Charlotte, Leroy's wife, is a social activist. "I love to play a woman who's unraveling," the actress says.

In the first *It* movie (2017) directed by Andy Muschietti, a young Mike Hanlon (Chason Jacobs) goes to work at the family sheep farm. He holds a captive bolt pistol to the head of an animal that needs to be put down, but the boy can't bring himself to pull the trigger. His grandfather, Leroy Hanlon, frustrated by this hesitancy, snatches the instrument out of Mike's hand and carries out the deed himself.

"There are two places you can be in this world. You can be out here, like us, or you can be in there, like them," Leroy says, gestating towards the sheep locked in their pen. "You waste time hemmin' and hawin' and someone else is gonna make that choice for you, except you won't know it until you feel that bolt between your eyes."

It's a blip in the larger context of the story, but one that Jovan Adepo (*Babylon*, *3 Body Problem*) thought of when he took the job of playing younger Leroy on *It: Welcome to Derry*, Muschietti's eight-episode HBO Max prequel series premiering Oct. 26 that follows the child-eating entity's rampage in the Maine town 27 years prior to this moment in the film.

"That actor, Steven Williams, played my grandfather on my first show, *The Leftovers*," Adepo points out to ** of the man behind Leroy on film. "So it was really cool to get to play the younger him in this. It was just a weird coincidence."

Blake Cameron James as Will Hanlon on 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

Brooke Palmer/HBO Max

In *It: Welcome to Derry*, the year is 1962 when Adepo's Leroy moves to town with his wife, Charlotte (Taylour Paige), and son, Will (Blake Cameron James). A major in the U.S. Air Force and veteran of the Korean War, he's here to work on the nearby military base under the direction of General Shaw (James Remar), which happens to coincide with the latest emergence of It, the shapeshifting creature that awakens every few decades to feed.

The material is largely based on the interludes of Stephen King's *It* novel, in which an adult Mike Hanlon, a member of the Loser's Club, interviews residents of Derry in an attempt to track the origins of the creature. (Mike was played as a grown up by Isaiah Mustafa in Muschietti's 2019 movie sequel *It Chapter 2.*)

"Mike Hanlon is the bookkeeper. He's the only Loser who stays in town," Muschietti says in an interview with Barbara Muschietti, his sister and longtime producing partner. "He's probably the guy with a stronger drive to get to the truth of things, and that means he's a very prominent character in this world. We owed it to the Hanlons to tell their story."

'IT: Welcome to Derry' exclusive first look confirms Black Spot, other horrors of Derry history

'It: Welcome to Derry' screens first 10 minutes of premiere at Comic-Con

Adepo pulled inspiration from his own dad's background to play Leroy; he and the character both grew up in Tennessee and served in the Air Force. "There's a big part of me doing my best imitation of who I thought my father was when I was younger," the actor shares, describing a "very structured and very moral" man in the mind of his childhood self.

"Somebody who is always by the book, if you're not careful, can come off really boring. But I definitely consider Lee very compelling, very brave, very family oriented, loving, and also just a man of that time in the '60s," Adepo explains. "A lot of men maybe weren't as expressive back then as we are able to be now. I think Leroy just had a big responsibility of uprooting his family, but doing so because he thought this particular town was the best place for them to finally grow and put a foundation down."

It's a variation of King's source material, but no creative tweak was unfounded. The book's version of these particular events takes place in the 1930s with a focus on a younger Will Hanlon, who was described on the page as serving in the army on the Derry-adjacent air base. To align with the timeline of their movies, the Muschiettis reworked the setting of *It: Welcome to Derry* around Leroy in the 1960s. As the director and co-creator puts it, "We just fused characters and created a compelling situation."

The new timeline naturally gave the horrors that plague Derry and the Hanlons a different context. A central event adapted in season 1 will be the burning of the Black Spot, which was a speakeasy established by the African American servicemen at the Air Force base to create a safe space away from the rest of town. King wrote how the joint was set ablaze by members of a white supremacist group, called the Maine Legion of White Decency, with It lurking on the sidelines.

Taylour Paige as Charlotte Hanlon on 'It: Welcome to Derry'.

Brooke Palmer/HBO Max

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The Civil Rights Movement and the era of Martin Luther King, Jr. now add an intriguing layer as the backdrop to all this tragedy on *It: Welcome to Derry*. Paige teases a little of how the monstrous entity preys on the tension of the period.

"It's scary when you have this clown that does really evil things, but then you have the silence and the lack of morale in a community. The complicit nature of minding your business," she says. "Some people have their rights, but for the most part, we're comfortable with the fact that most people don't and they happen to be dark-skinned. There's such an unspoken energy that is obviously really wrong, but everyone is okay with it. It's almost like a gaslighting consciousness."

For Muschietti, "We needed to tell the story of the Black community that was going through these hardships," he says, "and in that way, also tell a part of the story of America in those years."

Paige's Charlotte plays a big role in how that part of the story unfolds. Unlike Leroy, who works for "the man," his wife is anti-establishment. She comes with a history of rallying as a social justice activist in service of the rights of Black people. When It starts hunting in Derry, she begins to recognize how...*something* is weaponizing fear within the community.

"Intuitively, something's off," Paige describes. "It was in her gut all along. Even in her intimate life, she's like, 'My husband is committed to this role and duty for this country, but is this country committed to his freedom and our rights, also?' What's interesting about being someone in 1962, especially a woman, is you could have these feelings and you would have to suppress that to be alive in the time."

Ultimately, "I love to play a woman who's unraveling and bursting at the seams," Paige continues. "I loved being presented a character who is presenting one way. As we evolve through the show, she's dutiful, but she's solely breaking inside because she has a sense that something's really not right."

Adepo and Paige met for the first time over coffee after auditions. They were both in Los Angeles before the cast flew out to Toronto for the start of filming. Adepo recalls sitting "for hours" talking about who they thought Leroy and Charlotte were. He also made playlists, one he thought defined just Leroy and a separate one for the Hanlons as a couple.

"Two people, polar opposites, but having a deep love for one another and an appreciation for who that person was is something that we tried to anchor the dynamic in no matter what disagreements or altercations we [as characters] had throughout the show," Adepo says.

"Getting to know each other was building the history of Charlotte and Leroy, this young couple that met when they were teenagers," Paige adds. "We built our story so that you felt the familiarity and, even though they were going through this really tough time because of their environment, you would still want to root for their family."

*The cast and creators of *It: Welcome to Derry* will preview the show at a panel at New York Comic Con this Saturday, Oct. 11, at 11 a.m. The series will premiere on HBO Sunday, Oct. 26, at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT. *

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