Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige talk about the realistic and supernatural fears present in their new HBO series, It: Welcome to Derry.

Set in 1960s Derry, Maine, and based in the world of Stephen King’s It, Adepo and Paige play a couple who have moved to the mostly-white town to start a new life. While they have to worry about discrimination and racism, they also start realizing there’s another, more otherworldly terror lying beneath the town.

Jovan Adepo and Taylor Paige on portraying this experience

Adepo talked about how easy it is to play the fears and anxieties of being Black in America.

“I think it’s a much easier assignment to imagine the fear of what’s outside because we experience it in real life, you know what I mean?” he said to Blavity’s Shadow and Act during our cast interview. “It’s, you know, walking down the street and feeling that you’re making other people feel uncomfortable because you’re Black. That’s something that I’ve experienced before. So playing it on screen, I mean, that’s easy homework.”

Paige agreed, adding that the added pressure of being a woman adds to the anxiety.

“You’ve been treated like you’re the entity when in reality you’re the one fighting for your life. And there’s some kind of warped reality going on that we’ve all just kind of accepted to be on earth in this country, I guess,” she said. “But it does inform something incredibly rich. Like for me, I’m a woman. It’s 1962. I mean, my grandmother was probably my age in 1962, and I thought I considered her walking through the world and what that looked like. Segregation, you know, having opinions, being a woman who wanted to have a voice.

She continued, “But in that time it’s like just, and, and even just the considering of like how one dresses being kind of buttoned up…and like what that does to one’s body and the carefulness of the articulation of how one speaks, on top of the fact that we have this entity that’s literally haunting our town. But my character, Charlotte, knows that something is just not right. Something’s not right in this country. Something’s not right in this f****d up town. Something’s not right. And that kind of warped reality. And her being [a] woman back then, all women were looked at so hysterically. Like you’re just hysterical.”

Watch the full cast interview above.

Welcome to Derry, which also stars Chris Chalk, James Remar and Bill Skarsgård, who is reprising his role as the multidimensional demon Pennywise, debuts this Sunday, Oct. 26, on HBO.