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Timothée Chalamet in ‘Wonka’.
Courtesy of the Everett Collection
One of the actors hired to play Willy Wonka in an “immersive experience” fan event that became a viral sensation for all the wrong reasons is speaking out about what really happened behind the scenes.
UK fan attraction Willy’s Chocolate Experience – who was inspired by Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but not officially linked to the book or the films, it promised to transport ticket buyers to a fantastical world. The organizers used spectacular photos generated by artificial intelligence to attract customers to a barren and depressing warehouse (some photos below) that left parents furious and children crying, and the police were called to the scene.
The independent spoke with actor Paul Connell, one of three hired to play the whimsical chocolatier at the event. Connell revealed that he was hired at the last minute and was sent a script that had “15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing about this crazy stuff.”
“What got me was I had to say, ‘There’s a man whose name we don’t know. We know him as the Unknown. This Stranger is an evil chocolate maker who lives within the walls,’” he recalled. “He was terrifying for the children. Is it an evil man who makes chocolate or is chocolate itself evil?
In any case, the event was apparently chocolate-free despite being titled “Chocolate Experience.” “They told us to give (the kids) a jelly bean and a quarter cup of lemonade,” Connell said. “There is no chocolate in the chocolate experience. “There was supposed to be a chocolate fountain somewhere, but I never saw it.”
Connell was also supposed to use a vacuum cleaner at the end of his monologue to suck the evil “Unknown Man” out of the factory walls, but the event didn’t even have a vacuum cleaner, so he had to frantically improvise.
The actor ended up playing Wonka for nearly four hours straight without a break as organizers urged him to move the kids around the warehouse faster. “I didn’t know where I ended and Wonka began,” he said. “At that point he was losing his mind.”
Finally, the parents became quite angry and the event turned into chaos. Connell decided to leave him along with some Oompa Loompas.
“There was an angry crowd at the door and they wouldn’t let her in,” she said. “People were screaming, the people organizing the event were crying. There were arguments, people running everywhere, the set had been vandalized… It was actually becoming quite dangerous for us. But to be honest, it was heartbreaking. There were kids in better costumes than ours, crying… We, as actors, were hired at the last minute and did the best we could for the kids.”
Connell also noticed that the word “contract” was misspelled in his contract.
The Guardian previously reported that event organizers refunded tickets and apologized for the “very stressful and frustrating day,” telling customers: “Unfortunately, at the last minute we were let down in many areas of our event and we did everything we could to continue and moving forward and now we realize we probably should have canceled first thing this morning.”