There is nothing I love more than an over-hyped event gone awry, whether it be Splendour in the Mud, Fyre Fest, or if you really cast your mind back, Dash Con. So it was truly my lucky day when news broke of a “Wonka Experience” in Glasgow that was so misleading, so disappointing, and so creepy that the children who walked into it were left screaming and parents called the police. Now, the event’s contracted Willy Wonka and Oompa Loompa actors have broken their silence on what went down behind the scenes, and it’s about as cursed as it sounds.
With the recent Willy Wonka revival starring Timothée Chalamet, it’s no surprise that a new generation of children would develop a love for the iconic character.
Instead, they got the fright of a lifetime — much like we did when we watched Augustus Gloop drown in chocolate as wee babes — when what promised to be a “whimsical” immersive experience where “chocolate dreams become reality” ended up being a sad, bare warehouse with a few plastic mushrooms.
Paul Connell, a stand-up comedian who was hired to be the event’s Willy Wonka impersonator, told The Independent that the script he was given was “AI-generated gibberish” that rambled about an evil man in the walls. Um, what?!
“I’m constantly applying for more acting jobs and comedy work, then I got a phone call on Thursday saying, ‘Congratulations you are going to play Willy Wonka, we will send you over the script and dress rehearsal is tomorrow’,” he recalled.
“They even misspelt my contract but I do have a legally binding ‘Coontract’ [sic]. But I stayed up all night learning it, thinking this would make sense in the dress rehearsal when I see all the tech.”
Connell said the script was a complete mess and didn’t make sense.
“The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things.
“The bit that got me was where I had to say, ‘There is a man, we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.’
“It was terrifying for the kids. Is he an evil man who makes chocolate or is the chocolate itself evil?”
I’m sorry, WHAT?!
And, yes, the event did actually cast someone as the Unknown, whose entire job was to jump out from dark corners and frighten children.
Sir, that is the Babadook!!!
When Connell arrived at the event, he was shocked to see how absolutely deceptive the descriptions had been. There were no “enchanting” exhibitions in sight — it was an empty warehouse.
“In some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here,” he said.
“I spoke to the people running it and thought, surely by the morning it won’t look like this, and then I turned up in the morning and it absolutely did.
“At the end of my monologue, I was supposed to suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner. I asked them if they had a vacuum cleaner and they said, ‘yeah, we haven’t really got there yet, so just improvise’.”
Connell said that he and the other actors quickly realised they were in way over their heads, but felt bad for the children that were attending and so tried their best to make the situation work.
“I was told I would get a 15-minute break every 45 minutes after each group went through,” he said.
“But I ended up playing Willy Wonka for three and a half hours straight. I didn’t know where I ended and Wonka began. I was losing my mind by that point.”
Unfortunately, the event was not something he or any of the other actors could fix — there was no chocolate at the chocolate factory, kids were sobbing, angry mobs of parents were yelling at people, and poor Connell found the whole thing deeply heartbreaking.
Equally traumatised by the experience was Kirsty Paterson, who you may know from the viral pic below:
Yep, that’s an Oompa Loompa from the Wonka Experience, complete with an assemblage that resembles a meth lab, complete with a zooted facial expression.
Paterson, who usually works as a yoga teacher and fire dancer, was hired as one of the Oompa Loompas at the event and is horrified by the what it became.
Turns out that she, too, was not paid and that she didn’t even know what her role was going to be until she arrived.
In an interview with Vulture, Paterson revealed that she suspected the script was AI-generated but she’d already signed a contract and felt like she couldn’t leave.
To her horror, upon arrival she discovered there was no make up and the costumes were laughable. However, she tried her best to make the “incredibly, shockingly bad set” bearable for the kids.
“I don’t know how else you can put sprinkles on shit, but we were trying to be the sprinkles on shit,” she said.
As for the viral photo, Paterson wants the world to know she does NOT normally look like that.
“In the exact moment of the photo, they’d told us to abandon the script. They had this ‘Jellybean Room’ but they eventually ran out of jelly beans. I was already rationing the jelly beans to three per kid, and that was me being generous. I wanted to give the kids all the candy.
“So we had no jelly beans, and people were coming up to me. It was just humiliating. I was starting to get angry. The other Oompa Loompa came over at this point and I went, ‘Where is everyone?! Why am I left here on my own?! Where is everyone else?!’
“You know how they talk about ‘me contemplating my life? This is me contemplating my life’.”
Someone start a GoFundMe for Paterson, Connell and the rest of the Wonka Experience actors because they need to be compensated for this psychic damage.
Image: Twitter
