Emily Perkins is the Canadian actress who played young Beverly Marsh in Stephen King’s It and Brigitte Fitzgerald in the Ginger Snaps films. Two roles, and two generations of horror fans who can pick her out of any lineup — and both of them hinge on the same thing: a girl standing next to the monster, refusing to run. She was thirteen years old when she faced down Pennywise in the most-watched horror broadcast of its era. A decade later she was the quiet sister trying to cure a werewolf with a syringe of monkshood. If your horror education happened anywhere near a television in the nineties, Emily Perkins was part of it.
Quick Specs
- Born: 4 May 1977, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- Known for: Young Beverly Marsh in Stephen King’s It (1990); Brigitte Fitzgerald in the Ginger Snaps trilogy; Crystal Braywood in Hiccups
- Full name: Printed here as Emily Perkins — references disagree on her middle name (“Jean” in one, “Jane” in another, including her own Insomnia credit), so this page settles neither
- Years active: 1989–2019
- Awards: YTV Achievement Award for best young actress (1990); Best Actress, Málaga International Week of Fantastic Cinema (2001); Leo Award for Da Vinci’s Inquest (2003); Chainsaw Award for Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed (2005)
A Working Child Actress, Not a Discovery Myth
The lazy version of this story says a nobody was plucked from obscurity to play Beverly Marsh. The record says otherwise. Perkins started in television at twelve, and by the time It aired she already had a small, serious résumé: a guest spot on Danger Bay in 1989, the voice of Katy Caboose in Little Golden Book Land the same year, and two television films — Small Sacrifices (1989), the Diane Downs case, in which she played Downs’s daughter Karen, and Anything to Survive (1990), in which she played Krista. Small Sacrifices won her the YTV Achievement Award for best young actress in 1990. Three made-for-television films in roughly her first year of screen acting — Small Sacrifices, Anything to Survive and It — is not a discovery story. It is a working child actress having a very good year.
Young Beverly Marsh
Stephen King’s It — the two-part ABC miniseries directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, adapted from Stephen King‘s 1986 novel — went out over two November nights in 1990, 18 and 20 November, in the middle of sweeps, and pulled in some 30 million viewers. It was filmed over three months in Vancouver in mid-1990, which is how a Vancouver kid got the part: Perkins and Marlon Taylor, the young Mike Hanlon, were cast out of Vancouver, while Seth Green and Jonathan Brandis were cast out of Los Angeles. Perkins, born 4 May 1977, turned thirteen that May, right at the front edge of the production — twelve turning thirteen across the shoot, and thirteen when it aired. The character she played is billed, precisely, as Beverly Marsh, age 12.
Beverly is the only girl in the Losers Club — seven outcast kids in 1960 who band together against the thing under Derry — and hers is the hardest home life of the seven: she lives with her abusive father, Alvin Marsh, played by Frank C. Turner. The adult Beverly — a fashion designer who escaped that house into an abusive relationship — is played by Annette O’Toole, cast at John Ritter’s suggestion. Perkins is the young Beverly; any page that blurs the two halves of the role is doing both actresses a disservice. Wallace brought the adult and child casts together for a couple of days so the paired performances would match, even though they share no scenes, and he has said since: “I’m especially proud of the adult/child pairings, as I think we made really astute choices.” O’Toole, on the character they split between them: “What I loved about the character was the way she dealt with this terrible, lonely and abusive childhood she had and the way she found a family with these other kids.”
Perkins gets the childhood strand’s signature shot: in the sewer confrontation it is Beverly who slingshots the silver earrings at It, “breaking” Pennywise’s head open — the adult Beverly later retrieves the overshot earring for the final fight. And she got the full Tim Curry experience. Curry stayed in character around the child cast, and Perkins has said plainly why: “He really tried to intimidate us, because he wanted the fear to be real in our performances.” Decades on, she returned to the miniseries’ story as herself in the documentary Pennywise: The Story of It (2021). One boundary worth drawing in ink: Perkins has no connection to the 2017 and 2019 It films — the young Beverly there is Sophia Lillis, the adult Jessica Chastain. Different Derry, different Beverly.
The Canadian Years
It made her a familiar face on Canadian television, and Canadian television is where she built the career. In 1990 she took her first regular series role, Marie Sullivan in the family comedy-drama Mom P.I. The early nineties brought a run of TV films — Desiree Helm in Miracle on I-880 (1993), Abby in Woman on the Ledge (1993), Suzanne Stevens in Moment of Truth: Broken Pledges (1994), Kathy Ewalt in the In Cold Blood miniseries (1996) — and Past Perfect (1996), her film debut in a key role as Karen “Shy Girl” Daniels. In 1998 she played three roles — Dara Kernof, Paula Koklos and Roberta Dyer — in a single episode of The X-Files, “All Souls.”
The long run was Da Vinci’s Inquest. She first appeared in 1998 as Carmen, in “The Most Dangerous Time,” then returned in 2001 as Sue Lewis and stayed: 34 further episodes, 35 appearances in all. In 2003 she won the Leo Award for best supporting performance in a dramatic series for the role. It is not the flashiest line on this page, but it might be the most Canadian-actor line imaginable: a decade’s steady work on the country’s defining crime drama, with an award to show for it.
Brigitte Fitzgerald
Then, a decade after Beverly, came the role that owns the other half of her reputation. Ginger Snaps (2000), directed by John Fawcett and written by Karen Walton, is the Canadian werewolf film about two morbid sisters in a suburb that deserves them. Get the sisters right, because everybody swaps them: Katharine Isabelle plays Ginger Fitzgerald, the older sister, who has just begun her first period when a creature bites her and the change starts. Perkins plays Brigitte — the younger sister, the film’s anchor, the one who researches the curse, brews the monkshood and spends the film trying to cure the person she loves most while that person becomes the thing in the basement. In the climax Brigitte faces the transformed Ginger holding a monkshood syringe in one hand and a knife in the other; Ginger lunges, and fatally wounds herself on the knife.
The pairing was cast as a pairing: Perkins and Isabelle read for the parts together and were selected to play the sisters — two young actresses with oddly parallel starts, both of whom had passed through The X-Files. Perkins had cut her hair before her casting was confirmed and wore a wig through the shoot. The film premiered at the Munich Fantasy Filmfest in August 2000, screened at TIFF that year, and reached theatres in May 2001 to critical praise; it was no commercial hit on release, but it has since amassed a cult following — a critical assessment, to be clear, not a box-office one. Perkins won Best Actress at the Málaga International Week of Fantastic Cinema in 2001 for Ginger Snaps, and was nominated for the Chainsaw Award for it the following year.
Both follow-ups arrived in 2004, filmed back-to-back. Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed makes Brigitte the lead — infected herself now, the story turned inward on the sister who survived — in the largest film role of Perkins’s career; it won her the Chainsaw Award for best actress in 2005, along with induction into the Horror Hall of Fame. Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning went the other way in time, a period prequel casting Perkins and Isabelle as the sisters’ ancestors. Three films, one sister act, and the rare trilogy where the quiet one carries the ending.
Becky Rosen and the Supporting Years
Through the 2000s Perkins worked steadily in supporting parts, several of them in films people still quote at her. She was Ellen in Prozac Nation (2001); in Insomnia (2002) she has the small role of the girl reading a speech at the funeral — and was credited as Emily Jane Perkins, one of the reasons this page won’t pretend her middle name is settled. She played Eunice Bates in She’s the Man (2006), the “Punk Receptionist” at the women’s clinic in Juno (2007) — a small role, credited exactly that way, Punk and all — and Brittany “Britt” Blatt in Another Cinderella Story (2008), which reunited her with Katharine Isabelle as her sister Bree. Blood: A Butcher’s Tale (2010) credits her as Goth Chick; Repeaters (2010) credits her as Jumper. Print the credits, not the billing: she was a working actor collecting good small parts, and she was good in them.
And then there is Becky Rosen. In 2009 — not 2008, whatever older pages still say — Perkins debuted in the Supernatural season five premiere, “Sympathy for the Devil,” as the show’s most dangerous creature: a fan. Becky is an obsessive follower of the in-universe Supernatural books, with a particular fixation on Sam Winchester, and the joke kept coming back across a decade: “The Real Ghostbusters” (2009), “Season Seven, Time for a Wedding!” (2011), in which Becky magically marries Sam and is briefly credited as Becky Rosen-Winchester, and “Atomic Monsters” (2019), in the show’s final season. Four episodes in ten years — never a regular, always an event.
The Step Back
Her last series-regular role was a comedy: Crystal Braywood, the flighty secretary in Hiccups, the CTV sitcom created by and starring Brent Butt, which began in March 2010 and was cancelled after two seasons. In 2014 she played Marty Crocker — some listings give the name as Marta — across two episodes of When Calls the Heart, and played Nancy in Extraterrestrial (2014), her last feature film role to date. After 2014, her screen work narrows to a single entry: the 2019 Supernatural return. She has largely stepped back from acting; her last screen role was that one night back as Becky Rosen. Encyclopedic references state that she is married to Ernest Mathijs, a Belgian-Canadian film academic — one line, because that is all the verified record supports — and in 2020 she was describing herself as working as a teacher on call, a substitute teacher, in British Columbia. That is the whole of the record, and it is enough: the girl who fought the clown and the sister who fought for the wolf both got to walk away on their own terms.