Major spoilers for episode 5 of Welcome To Derry below. You've been warned!
Say it ain't so, Pauly. Maj. Leroy Hanlon's good buddy and right-hand man just made the ultimate sacrifice.
Capt. Pauly Russo was the kind of guy who would jump in front of a bullet for a friend, and that's just what he did in Sunday's episode of It: Welcome to Derry.
Rudy Mancuso, who plays Pauly, sat down with FANGORIA for a debrief on his character's fate and his own connection to the It universe.
“I never thought that I would be a part of this universe,” he says. “I don't know that I deserve to be a part of the universe. It's a small character, but a very important one, as I think people will see.”
The actor is also a director, writer and composer on the rise in Hollywood. Long before he was making his own films, he fell under the inescapable spell of Pennywise.
“I've been a fan of Stephen King and the It universe and mythology for as long as I could remember,” Mancuso says from his home in Los Angeles, recalling the 1990 ABC miniseries starring Tim Curry as the dastardly clown.
In 2017, Mancuso was floored by director Andy Muschietti's take in the 1988-set movie It, which was tremendously successful at the box office, grossing $719 million worldwide.
“I'm not a big horror thriller fan, per se, but I am a fan of great filmmaking and great storytelling, and sometimes those coalesce,” he says.
“I remember tweeting at [Muschietti] and at the composer, Benjamin Wallfisch (also the composer of It: Welcome to Derry), saying ‘what you guys were able to pull off in this film is nothing short of incredible and astounding, to make something so beautiful and sophisticated yet so tragic and so horrifying.'”
Later, he met both Wallfisch and Muschietti, who followed the film up with the 2019 sequel It: Chapter Two. HBO's It: Welcome to Derry, set in 1962, serves as a prequel series.
“The idea of Pennywise and fear and shape-shifting into whatever the victim fears … Derry, Maine as this cursed fictional town … these are some really big, complex ideas, and to see it iterated and reimagined in a modern way, but also being period, really, really inspired me,” Mancuso says. “So I loved the choice of the first It, adapting it into the '80s, and now to see it in the 1962 setting, which is even more accurate to the text and the source, is a dream. The expectations were, for me, not only fulfilled, but exceeded.”
In It: Welcome to Derry, Mancuso's Pauly is an airman and Korean War veteran who arrives in Derry as Cold War fears grip America, and the threat of nuclear annihilation has kids practicing “duck and cover” at school. Another threat — the mostly unseen Pennywise and his many dark manifestations — links with the secret military project that summons Hanlon (Jovan Adepo) and Pauly to the Maine town.
“Neibolt Street,” the fifth episode of Derry, sees Hanlon with his finger on the trigger of his gun, his young son Will in the crosshairs (Blake Cameron James).
He is convinced the person standing there is not his son — just another trick of the mind summoned by the nefarious force enveloping Derry. It's one of the few episodes where Pennywise does materialize in clown form, bringing Bill Skarsgård (also an executive producer of the show) back to the sewer for more clowning around.
Hanlon warns Pauly that most of what they're seeing is not real, but instead the product of their own fears, exploited by the supernatural enemy messing with their heads.
But Pauly realizes that Will isn't a Pennywise-manufactured vision.
“I see him too … he's real,” he tells Hanlon as the father points his gun directly at his son.
“Leroy, he's real!”
But Hanlon is locked in, so Pauly throws his body in front of the gun to shield Will and gets hit in the chest as his longtime companion fires the gun.
Mancuso, 33, landed on the HBO series because of his relationship with Muschietti and his sister Barbara Muschietti, who are executive producers.
“Andy and I became very close in 2019,” he says. “The growth of our friendship has been exponential ever since. I was a big fan of his work, obviously, and he of mine. The friendship quickly progressed from friends with a connection and camaraderie into collaborators.”
Mancuso made his feature directorial debut in Música (2024), a musical romantic comedy from Amazon MGM Studios in which he stars with his now-fiancée Camila Mendes. The film is based on his life and experiences with synesthesia. Mancuso, who is also known for his popular YouTube series Awkward Puppets, plays a street performer who works with puppets and hears music in everyday sounds.
Mancuso wrote, composed and choreographed the sparkling debut, set in the Brazilian American community of Newark's Ironbound neighborhood in his native New Jersey. (His real mother plays his mom, and they filmed in his childhood home.)
When he was prepping the film and Muschietti was working on the 2023 DC movie The Flash — both directors make brief appearances in each other's films — they hatched a plan for another movie.
Mancuso would be the director and composer of a film based on a long-gestating idea from Muschietti. That movie, The Abduction of a Pop Star (formerly titled The Stand-In), is “a story from the perspective of a stand-in who devises a meticulous plan to kidnap and replace a very famous star,” Mancuso says. “And I won't say who that star is, but they're going to be playing themselves in the movie.”
The film, also set for Amazon, will be a “dark comedy musical thriller,” Mancuso says, combining the two filmmakers' sensibilities in what he calls their “collaborative opus.”
In the meantime, the directors agreed they'd continue to cast each other in their respective work.
When It: Welcome to Derry came around, there was some overlap between Pauly and Mancuso, who is half Italian and has a penchant for comedy — “no-nonsense, no filter and almost the polar opposite to all of the characteristics of Hanlon,” he says of the character.
Muschietti told Mancuso that Pauly's dialogue would be written with him in mind.
“I like to think that he's from Jersey, even though it's not explicitly mentioned,” says Mancuso, who grew up in Glen Ridge, a suburb about 15 miles outside New York City. (He's also set to direct Disney's New Jersey-set Bob The Musical, about “a guy who gets stuck in a musical.”)
He says Pauly uses humor as a defense mechanism for being on the shorter side. In the role, the actor channeled his experience of being heavier as a child.
“Creating was my outlet. It was also my defense, it was my safe haven. It's the real world that scares and scared me,” Mancuso says.
“I had to quickly realize that using creativity and humor was a way to outsmart the bullies, and I like to believe that's very much the case in Pauly Russo.”
A trusting friendship between Hanlon and Pauly is key to the emotional heft of losing him in the story. Hanlon wants to save the fellow pilot from his fate in those dark tunnels, but Pauly stops him.
“It's my turn,” he protests as blood drips down his chin. “Make it count.”
Hanlon holds his friend's head as he rolls to the side and dies in the episode, written by showrunner Brad Caleb Kane and directed by Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr.
“Russo was a good man,” Gen. Francis Shaw (James Remar) tells Hanlon.
“Yes he was, sir,” Hanlon replies.
He wants to know — did the telepathic soldier Dick Hallorann (Chris Chalk, as a young version of the character Scatman Crothers played in “The Shining“) make it out of the Derry sewer?
Yes. Just in time to clock a newly dead Pauly. Though Hanlon carried his body out of the sewer, he is seemingly reanimated in spirit form.
Still wearing his Air Force uniform, he looks lost, his eyes shot through with icy blue.
Welcome To Derry is streaming on HBO Max, with new episodes every Sunday. For more, check out our weekly podcast, Watching IT: Welcome To Derry.
