Welcome to Derry Creator and Star Tease Finale

It: Welcome to Derry creator Andy Muschietti and star Matilda Lawler, who portrays Marge, discuss the character’s odd phobia. Muschietti also teased that her fear ties into the season finale.

The premiere episode of It: Welcome to Derry already introduced Marge’s fear, her new glasses, because they made her eyes look too big. In episode 4, her phobia gets blown out of proportion when It decides to strike. After watching a film about parasitic flatworms, she suffers from a hallucination in which her eyes appear to grow and bulge out of her face. Convinced something is inside of them, she panics and tries to cut her eyes out. Lilly (Clara Stack) interferes and stops her. While she managed to stop Marge from gouging her own eyes out, she still ended up damaging one of them.

In an interview with TV Insider, Lawler explained why she believed her character was so afraid of wearing glasses. She said that it likely stemmed from normal teenage insecurities. Kids of Marge’s age are usually very self-conscious, especially if they’re trying to fit into a group they don’t necessarily feel comfortable with, which is exactly what she is going through. She’s trying to appease the popular girls at school, and her glasses are preventing her from feeling accepted.

She’s deeply insecure about so many things, but one of the main things being her glasses. And so it was very fun, especially as a teen girl, being able to kind of scream about it and scream about the insecurities, because It preys on Marge’s insecurities. The scare scene with the eyes does have a centering effect on Marge and kind of causes her to reflect on her relationships and see the truth in a way and see that she belongs with her friend Lilly and with the ‘Losers,’ and it’s OK for her to find herself elsewhere, not in the group that you know everyone thinks she should be in.

Muschietti also shared how Marge’s fear of glasses is foreshadowing a major reveal in the finale. He said that her phobia is far deeper than what it appears to be at first glance, and it’s more than just an insecurity. “There’s a specific reason that’s not going to be revealed until the very last episode for which she is wearing the Coke bottle glasses. And so we decided that [her fear] was about the eyes,” he explained.

It: Welcome to Derry releases new episodes every Sunday at 9:00 PM ET and 6:00 PM PT on HBO.