Courtesy Warner Bros/HBO
Clara Stack has spent much of the past few years inhabiting a place considerably darker than Highlands. As Lilly Bainbridge in HBO’s IT: Welcome to Derry, the young actress found herself in Stephen King’s notoriously troubled Maine town, where childhood grief has a way of materializing into something even more terrifying.
Last month, Stack came to another small town, one considerably more familiar, as a guest of the Highlands-Cashiers Film Festival. She returned to a place she has visited since childhood and where her family has deep roots in the performing arts.
Her grandmother, Mary Adair Trumbly, served as executive director of the Highlands Performing Arts Center from 2010 to 2024, years that included the expansion and transformation of the PAC and its growing role in the cultural life of the Plateau.
For Clara, then, coming to Highlands as an actress carries a particular resonance.
The connection to performance runs through three generations. Trumbly had a background in dance before becoming an arts administrator. Clara’s mother, Amanda Stack, performed in theater in college and as an adult. Clara calls her “my number one inspiration.”
Clara started even earlier. She was singing and dancing around the house almost as soon as she could walk and joined children’s community theater at about four.
At seven, she sang in a Manhattan cabaret, where a manager spotted her and connected her with an agent. Television and film auditions, self-tapes and eventually roles followed.
Welcome to Derry, a prequel to King’s It, gave Stack a character with considerably more to contend with than the mechanics of horror. Lilly is a child already acquainted with loss, loneliness and fear, and Stack was attracted to precisely that interior complexity.
Stack described the work with a directness refreshingly free of rehearsed young-actor polish. She stayed close to what Lilly was feeling, the loneliness and sense of being lost, while the physical details of another era helped her enter Lilly’s world.
“I really love Lilly,” she says. “From the audition, I liked her depth” and the fact that, despite terrible loss, “she was still able to find some hope.”
Clara Stack | Courtesy Brooke Palmer/HBO
Period costumes, hair, props and locations helped Stack move beyond herself and more fully inhabit Lilly; so did a playlist of sixties music assembled by the young cast. The difficult scenes required her to remain deeply attuned to Lilly’s emotions, something Stack describes as both the most challenging and the most rewarding part of playing her.
Her performance earned Stack a Saturn Award nomination for Best Younger Performer in a Television Series. Welcome to Derry received two Creative Arts Emmy nominations and won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Television Series.
The production became an education of another sort. Filming in Toronto stretched across roughly two and a half years, interrupted by the actors’ strike, with Stack attending school with an on-set tutor. She missed New York and going to school with her friends, but found another community among the young cast, forming friendships that lasted beyond filming.
She was also struck by the enormous machinery behind an HBO production, the many people whose work viewers never see, and particularly by director Andy Muschietti, whose calm, collaborative approach allowed the young actors to bring their own ideas to their scenes. Watching him work, Stack says, was “really special.”
Now entering her junior year at a public performing-arts high school in Queens, Stack remains connected to theater even as television and film occupy more of her professional life. She hopes to pursue more characters that are “layered and complex,” especially dramatic roles that allow her to explore difficult emotional territory.
Amanda Stack, Clara Stack, and Mary Adair Trumbly
Her September appearance at the Highlands-Cashiers Film Festival, however, represented something different: a professional milestone folding back into family history.
“I’m so proud of my grandmama for the impact she’s had on her community,” Stack says. “She’s played such a big part in keeping the arts vital in Highlands.”
Clara knows Highlands not as a performer’s destination but as the place she has been coming to since she was little. She loves its natural beauty and the small-town intimacy so different from New York.
But when asked what she loves most about Highlands, she doesn’t hesitate. It is her grandmother, seeing her and seeing the mark she has made on the town.
There is something wonderfully circular about what happens next. For years, Mary Adair Trumbly helped bring performers before Highlands audiences and worked to make the arts a vital part of the community her granddaughter came here to visit.
Last month, the little girl who came to Highlands to see her Grandmama returned for the Highlands-Cashiers Film Festival as an accomplished young actor, carrying forward a family affinity for the stage in a way neither of them could have predicted.
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