Remembering James Ransone: His connection to the Stephen King universe through It Chapter Two, explored

Fans got the devastating news about The Wire's James Ransone's passing by s**c*ide. As the world mourns the passing of this actor, we would like to honor the late James Ransone by looking back at one of the actor's breakout roles on the big screen, the adult Eddie Kaspbrak in It Chapter Two.

James Ransone took over from Jack Dylan Grazer, who played the young Eddie in the 2017 and 2019 movies.

Looking back at James Ransone's Eddie Kaspbrak in It Chapter Two:

We meet James Ransone's Eddie in the first thirty minutes of It Chapter Two as a successful risk analyst in a New York insurance firm. He is married to a woman named Myra, who is overprotective of him, like Eddie's mother, Myra. This is why Molly Atkinson, who played Eddie's mother in the first movie, plays the role of his wife to make the joke obvious.

However, Eddie dies in the last act of the movie, and we learn that Richie Tozier (Bill Hader) was a closeted homosexual in love with the former all along. The main tragedy of the revelation is that Richie and Eddie never got together. This is different from the book as IT never hinted at Richie being a homosexual. James Ranson addressed this change in a September 2019 Polygon interview:

"I didn’t get through the entire book when I was reading it, and I was trying to comb through it and look at all the times when they were all together to see if there was anything I could mine from, aside from the scary stuff. What struck me was that — and this is just for me — one of the scariest things when the Losers all got back together is that none of them had children. I’m 40 years old. I’ve since had a kid — literally when I went to go start filming the movie — but I didn’t have a kid at the time, and that was really scary for me. If you’re talking about Richie’s token and all his stuff, that was a license that the filmmakers and the writers took for his storyline. On top of that — I would say this about any movie independent of It — that type of stuff is not interesting to me. I care about intimacy. I care about people telling the truth to one another. Anything that feels truthful, feels good. In the same way, I don’t really even care about the nature of Bev or Ben’s relationship, I just go, “Did it feel real? Did it look truthful?” And then the other thing too is I think we need to be very careful, especially in online culture, about this idea around objective meaning of art. If I tell you something means something, whether that’s a Rothko painting or a Beatles song, and you go, “I have a totally different interpretation of that!” It’s really crazy for me to go, “You’re wrong.” You’re like, “I had this whole emotional relationship with something.” But it’s also crazy for you to tell me I’m wrong. When we start saying art is something that is universally objectively saying this, we put ourselves in a very precarious position, because you start removing people’s relationships to everything. I’m not a fan of Justin Bieber, but I see why people like him, and if you like Justin Bieber and there are meaningful things in that song “Sorry” to you, I can’t tell you you’re an a**hole."

What is It Chapter Two about?

A follow-up to 2017's IT, Chapter Two is set in 2016, 27 years after The Losers beat Pennywise in 1989. The Losers have grown up, and everyone except for Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa) left Derry. Therefore, he is the only one who remembers their fight with Pennywise.

When Pennywise wakes up from his 27-year hibernation in 2016, Mike calls up Bill (James McAvoy), Beverley (Jessica Chastain), Ben Hanscom (Jay Ryan), Richie Tozier (Bill Hader), and Eddie Kaspbrak (James Ransone) to kill the clown.

"Because every 27 years evil revisits the town of Derry, Maine, “IT Chapter Two” brings the characters—who’ve long since gone their separate ways—back together as adults, nearly three decades after the events of the first film."

Needless to say, Ransone made his mark in the Stephen King Universe. We at SoapCentral would like to give our condolences to his wife and children.