‘IT: Welcome to Derry’ Star Taylour Paige Breaks Down the Everyday Horror Charlotte Encounters in Episode 2: “Charlotte’s Not Complicit”

In IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 2 “The Thing in the Dark,” we finally get to meet the rest of the Hanlon family. Major Leroy Hanlon’s (Jovan Adepo) wife Charlotte (Taylour Paige) arrives in Derry with son Will (Blake Cameron James) and immediately gets to work getting to know the locals. In fact, Charlotte might be the first Hanlon to intuit that there’s something very wrong about Derry. Part way through this week’s episode of the HBO show, Charlotte witnesses something awful happening in plain sight and is the only person willing to stop it.

**Spoilers for IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 2, now streaming on HBO Max**

In IT: Welcome to Derry Episode 2, Charlotte goes shopping for groceries in Derry and sees something that immediately upsets her. Across the street, three boys are beating up a fourth. Passersby ignore this, but Charlotte doesn’t. Charlotte is even told by someone, “Boys will be boys.” Charlotte refuses to accept this, however.

“Charlotte’s not complicit and doesn’t go for the ‘okey-doke.’ Charlotte is awake,” IT: Welcome to Derry star Taylour Paige told DECIDER.

So Charlotte goes outside, crosses that street, and makes the boys stop.

“Right away, you know that Charlotte has morale and integrity and is relentless in doing what she thinks is right,” Paige said.

What goes on to further disturb Charlotte, though, is the realization that everyone in Derry who sees this go down behaves as if she was the person in the wrong. Adding to the tension? The fact that Charlotte is a lone Black woman surrounded by white people.

“They all looked at her like she was psycho,” Paige said, before sharing she thought the townsfolk’s “hysteria” was “quite symbolic.”

“Just like doing what’s right, but then you’re weird for being the whistleblower? I thought that was really strong,” she said.

In the immediate aftermath of the scene, we see Charlotte complain about the experience at dinner with her husband and son. She describes the boys beating the other kid up as “dogs” fighting for scraps of food and threatens to find their parents. Both Leroy and Will beg her to relent, with Leroy referring to trouble that Charlotte had in their last town, Shreveport. It’s obvious from the conversation that while Leroy is happy rank and file member of the U.S. military, Charlotte is deeply involved in the contemporary Civil Rights Movement.

“I think Charlotte is so on the verge,” Paige said, but is kind of at odds with her role in her family and being a mother. And that is so unfortunately so limiting for someone with a mind like hers, of an empathy like hers, [who is] a mother like her.”

“Like she’s like, ‘That could be my son,’” she said, referring once again to Charlotte’s horror in the town. “What is going on? And doesn’t anyone else see this?”

So much about Stephen King’s work is about the horror lurking in plain sight, be it domestic violence, substance abuse, or bigotry. In Charlotte, we have a new heroine for his pantheon of characters, a woman who refuses to back down from evil… Even in Derry.