The Haunting of Bly Manor Featured Surprising The Room Cameo

The Haunting of Bly Manor hit Netflix last weekend and featured some big twists and hidden mysteries. The follow up to The Haunting of Hill House currently has an 86% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and has been a trending topic on Twitter. Despite the show being the talk of the town, there was one small detail you may have missed… the groom in the first and last episodes was played by Greg Sestero! Sestero is best known for playing Mark in The Room, the infamous movie that inspired the Oscar-nominated The Disaster Artist. Sestero recently spoke to Nerdist and explained how the cameo came to be.

“The joke has always been, whenever I talk about The Room, that when people started seeing it and it became this cult movie, I was like, ‘Oh cool, I’ll get acting work off of it.’ And I quickly learned that’s not going to happen,” Sestero explained. “So I ended up writing [The Disaster Artist] and all that, and Mike Flanagan—who’s a really great horror writer/director—was a big fan of The Disaster Artist and he was trying to get the rights to turn that into a film back when it first came out. But we had already got involved with the Francos.”

He added, “So, my first time ever doing a horror convention kind of thing, [Flanagan’s] wife Kate Siegel came up and was super cool, and said, ‘My husband would like to give you a cameo.’ I thought it was a joke. But it’s funny because now I can’t say that The Room didn’t get me acting work, because it finally paid off and put me in something that’s good.”

“We had a great time,” Sestero said of working with Flanagan. “We talked all about my experience with The Room, and his experience actually as a filmmaker I found really inspiring. I guess we had met at a screening of The Room in like 2009 or 2010. But, he was editing and doing a bunch of other film working, keeping his dream alive. And he made a film just using his apartment or something in one location and made it just by sheer will. And I thought that was just really inspiring because he did that and obviously now he’s gone on to make really great films and adapted Stephen King novels.” You can read the full interview here.

Flanagan has a new Netflix series in the works titled Midnight Mass and the show is set to feature familiar faces from The Haunting series. The cast includes Rahul Kohli, Annabeth Gish, Kate Siegal, and Henry Thomas.

The Haunting of Bly Manor is now streaming on Netflix.