8 Actors Who Scared Other Actors So Much They Forgot Their Lines

Tim Curry gave an outstandingly creepy performance as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the original 1990 miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's It, enough that it's not at all surprising that his in-character antics scared the absolute hell out of at least one of his young co-stars.

Nobody who's seen the miniseries will forget the opening sequence in which Pennywise murders young George Denbrough (Tony Dakota) after his paper sailboat drifts down a storm drain.

Even with 8-year-old Tony Dakota obviously well aware that he was shooting a film and Curry posed no real physical threat, that unsurprisingly didn't stop him from being thrown off by Curry's sublimely scary acting.

In a 2017 interview, Curry said that a terrified Dakota even stopped acting mid-take to let Curry know that he was scaring him:

"There was a point in It, at the beginning of the movie, this little kid called Georgie is sailing his boat down the gutter, and it goes down the drain, and Pennywise grabs it. And Georgie puts his hand down the drain, and I grab it, and I suggest that he joins me and say, 'Down here, you'll float.' And he stopped and said, 'Tim, you're scaring me.' I said, 'Gee, I'm so sorry, but that's what I'm supposed to be doing.

Curry then jokingly suggested that Dakota may have needed "quite a lot" of therapy after completing the scene with him. Though Dakota hasn't acted much since, he did reprise the role of Georgie in a 2019 fan-produced short film, which theorised Georgie's life if Pennywise hadn't killed him.