Taylour Paige Expresses Disappointment Over Charlotte Hanlon’s Shocking Choice in It: Welcome to Derry Season 1 Finale: “I Don’t Buy It”

Welcome to the thrilling season 1 finale of Derry, where star Taylour Paige has expressed her desire for more depth in her character, Charlotte Hanlon.

*Warning! Spoilers ahead for It: Welcome to Derry episode 8. If you haven’t caught up, now’s the time to turn back!*

After successfully sending Bill Skarsgård’s Pennywise back into his lengthy slumber, Rose, the Grogans, and Dick Hallorann prepare to leave the eerie town. However, the Hanlons choose to stay and take over the former farm, despite Leroy’s earlier objections. “Maybe the next damn fool mission needs to be together,” Charlotte tells her husband with a grin, hinting that the family is ready to become Derry’s new guardians.

For Paige, it was difficult to envision Charlotte making such a decision after everything they’ve endured. “I’m not happy with the way this was written, if I’m being honest,” she shared in a recent interview. “I’m like, ‘There’s no way.’ I mean, I guess the lore is that you forget when you’re in Derry, but I don’t buy it.”

Paige expressed that she “wanted more” for Charlotte, Leroy, and their son, Will, even though she recognizes that a woman choosing to return to traditional homemaking makes some sense in the context of the era. “I think it would have been maybe too radical for Charlotte to leave,” she noted. “And also too radical for women of 1962 to be like, ‘I’m out.’ That was very rare. It just didn’t really happen then, right? Most people stayed in loveless marriages. Most women, I think, had to deny themselves to keep the family together.”

While Paige wasn’t entirely satisfied with how Charlotte’s arc wraps up (we’re unlikely to see her again if It: Welcome to Derry season 2 is greenlit, as it will take place 27 years earlier), she appreciated the mother-son moments Charlotte shared. She also enjoyed the subplot involving Hank Grogan, whom she assisted after he was wrongfully accused of the movie theater murders.

“I think, being a mother – at least I can speak to it now after, I wasn’t a mother when I was shooting — but I think becoming a mother gives you these superpowers, and this super kind of compassion,” she explained. “That was a nice way to kind of get a little bit more of Charlotte’s inner world and the way that she thinks, and what she believes in, kind of gives you a little bit more color than just like, she’s at home cooking, stewing.”

It: Welcome to Derry is currently streaming.