Beverly Marsh in the IT Movies: Who Plays Her and What Happens

Beverly Marsh is one of the seven kids of the Losers Club, the band of outcasts who take on Pennywise in Derry, Maine. In It (2017), directed by Andy Muschietti, Sophia Lillis plays her as a kid. In It Chapter Two (2019) Jessica Chastain plays the adult Beverly and is the top billed name in the cast, while Lillis returns for the flashbacks, where the credits list her as Young Beverly Marsh. Her father, Mr. Marsh, is played by Stephen Bogaert in the first film.

Beverly joins the group after the brothers' search for Georgie Denbrough is already under way. Like Ben and Mike, she is an outcast bullied by Henry Bowers and his gang, and like every one of the kids she sees terrifying visions tailored to her own fears. Stephen King's book and the television versions, the 1990 miniseries and IT: Welcome to Derry (2025), tell their own versions of the story, and this profile covers only the two Muschietti films. For the rest of the group, see it characters and the losers club it page.

Beverly's closest ties are with Bill Denbrough and Ben Hanscom, and the films treat them very differently. Bill Denbrough is the boy who refuses to accept that his brother Georgie is dead, and his farewell kiss with Beverly closes the first film. Ben Hanscom is the boy whose kiss wakes her from the trance in the sewers, and by the end of Chapter Two the two of them are together.

So, why did Bill and Beverly not end up together? Neither film delivers a speech on the subject. What the films show is a kiss at the end of the summer of 1989, a long separation, and a sequel that finishes with Ben and Beverly as a couple.

Among the rest of the group, she is bound by the same oath as Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak, Mike Hanlon and Stanley Uris. Her enemies are Henry Bowers and his gang, and above all Pennywise, who takes her in the first film and who feeds on the fears she has to face in the second.

In my opinion, Beverly's best moments are the ones where she acts rather than waits to be rescued, and It (2017) has the strongest of them on Neibolt Street. Driving a spike into the creature's head is a close range act of defiance that makes it retreat. It could be argued that this is the turning point of the whole first film.

Second comes the sewer fight. Pennywise has just taken her, the boys have gone back for her, and when she wakes she stabs the creature in the face. The film could have left her as the prize waiting at the bottom of the well and, perhaps to its credit, it does not. The kiss that wakes her is the softer beat, and I would rank it below the stab.

Third is the Chapter Two reunion, where Chastain's Beverly shows visions suggesting the group will die if it breaks the oath. It is a bleak scene, and it explains why five adults stay in a town that nearly killed them. Her last scene, with the scars fading and Ben beside her, is a quieter payoff for a character who spent the end of the first film preparing to leave Derry. It is a bit like a long road trip that finally ends at the right town.