More details about the disastrous, unauthorized Willy Wonka “immersive experience” in Glasgow, Scotland have begun to emerge and now, one of the actors who was hired on to play Willy Wonka himself is opening up about the experience and what was going on behind the scenes. Speaking with The Independent (via The Hollywood Reporter,) Paul Connell opened up about the lack of chocolate at the event which had been billed a “Chocolate Experience”, a bizarre script he says was AI-generated, and even misspellings on the contract he signed.
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“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,” Connell said. “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things.”
He continued, “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.”
Connell went on to explain that at one point in his monologue he was supposed to “suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner” but when he asked if there was a vacuum cleaner, he was told they hadn’t gotten to that yet and he was to improvise. He also revealed that there was no chocolate at the experience — and they were instructed to give kids just one jelly bean and a quarter cup of lemonade. Connell said that eventually, he and the other two Wonka actors as well as some of the actors playing Oompa Loompas decided to walk away after the situation began to get dangerous.
“People were shouting, people who put on the event were crying. There were arguments, people running around everywhere — the set had been trashed,” he said.”
What Happened With the Unauthorized Willy Wonka Experience?
Over the weekend, fans who had paid around $40 to attend what was billed as an “immersive” Willy Wonka experience that promised to transform them to a “magical realm” in Glasgow, Scotland found themselves attending anything but. What had been billed by organizers House of Illuminate as “a journey filled with wondrous creations and enchanting surprises at every turn” though the reality ended up being little more than warehouse with few, underwhelming decorations.
“It was basically advertised as this big, massive Willy Wonka experience with optical illusions and big chocolate fountains and sweets,” attendee Eve Stewart told the BBC. “But when we got there, it was practically an abandoned, empty warehouse, with hardly anything in it.”
Attendees, who had paid $40 per ticket for entry, reported that the warehouse was decorated with plastic props, a small bouncy castle, and backdrops pinned to the walls. Children were reportedly in tears and Scotland police were even called. Online, it was reported that staff at the event had been given scripts the night before and one post shared photos of a performer staffing one of the “exhibits”, describing the scene as looking like a meth lab.
On Facebook, a spokesperson for House of Illuminati wrote that “Today has been a very stressful and frustrating day for many and for that we are truly sorry. Unfortunately, at the last minute we were let down in many areas of our event and tried our best to continue and puss through and now realise we probably should have cancelled first thing this morning instead,” The post also pledged to provide full refunds, which are expected to take ten days to process.
