Castle Rock Will Show a Different Side of Misery’s Annie Wilkes

The Stephen King TV universe is expanding this fall with the release of Castle Rock Season 2 on Hulu, which will once again offer a new exploration of the legendary author’s works. While the first season of the anthology series was most heavily connected to Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, this second season will go in a much different direction, focusing most closely on the world of Annie Wilkes, the main character of the book Misery. As explained in the original work, and the Misery feature film, Annie Wilkes is an obsessive fan of a famous writer, eventually kidnapping him and forcing him to live with her. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for the role in 1990 and Lizzy Caplan will look to bring the character new life nearly 30 years later.

Caplan stars as a younger Annie Wilkes in the second season of Castle Rock, who will be struggling with her deteriorating mental state throughout the new installment. She’s a mother to a teenage girl (Elsie Fisher) and her circumstances will allow Caplan to paint Annie in a much different light, offering more depth into her backstory.

“I think we hopefully will give you a different insight into the Annie Wilkes that you know and love from the past,” Caplan told EW.

As of now, there’s no telling whether or not Caplan’s Annie will have any run-ins with characters from the first season of Castle Rock. The only known connection between the two, at least at this point in time, is that they both take place in the same town. However, the idea for the series has always been that it will act a lot like King’s books, finding little ways to reference itself and bring other characters into the fold when you least expect to see them.

“The idea of the show was always that we were going to return to certain threads, and that over the course of many seasons we’d be building this giant Stephen King tapestry,” said co-creator Dustin Thomason. “So like Stephen does with his books, people will pop back up in unexpected places.”

Are you looking forward to seeing Caplan’s take on Annie Wilkes in Castle Rock Season 2? Do you think any character from the first season will return this time around? Let us know in the comments!

Castle Rock returns for its second season on October 23rd. The first season is currently streaming on Hulu.