Photo:Jenny Fogarty / SWNS
Jenny Fogarty / SWNS
An actor who was hired to work at theWilly Wonka-themed event in Scotland last weekend is speaking out about the nightmare experience.
Paul Connell was one of the actors hired to perform at “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” at the Box Hub Warehouse in Glasgow, which has since gone viral afterphotos of the near-empty warehousewere posted to social media.
The 31-year-old toldThe Independentthat he learned that he would be playing Willy Wonka on Thursday. He then received a 15-page script of what he described as “AI-generated gibberish,” according toToday.
At Friday’s dress rehearsal, Connell saw the near-empty warehouse where the event took place for the very first time, per The Independent. He hoped things would be different the next morning, but they unfortunately were not.
“People were shouting, people who put on the event were crying,” Connell told the outlet. “There were arguments, people running around everywhere — the set had been trashed.”
Before the event, Connell said the actors gathered and said, “We’re probably not going to get paid for this but kids are still going to come up. Let’s make this as magic as possible for them,” per The Independent.
But the experience was still a disaster. Actors were told they could only give out “one jelly bean and a quarter cup of lemonade” per person, and there was no chocolate in sight — even though House of Illuminati, which organized the event, had promised chocolate, per the report.
At one point, he added, Connell said the organizer told him, “You’re spending too much time with the kids, we need to get them through as quickly as possible.”
“By this point, I was visibly angry,” the actor told The Independent. “I was like, now there’s going to be a lot of disappointed kids.”
One video from the experience that has been shared online shows a dark, spooky figure called “the Unknown” emerging from behind a mirror, causing some children to cry. Connell told the outlet that the character was supposed to be “an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls,” but ultimately “was terrifying for the kids."
“At the end of my monologue, I was supposed to suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner,” he explained to The Independent. “I asked them if they had a vacuum cleaner and they said, ‘Yeah, we haven’t really got there yet, so just improvise.’ So I started to cut things out, thinking that would be silly.”
At one point, Connell said he and two other actors “decided to just walk away,” per the outlet. He added, “The whole thing was disrespectful to the families and us as promising actors.”
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Eventually, two police vans and two police cars eventually arrived at the scene, Connell toldToday.
House of Illuminati issued an apology for the “stressful and frustrating day,” according to SWNS. The organizers claimed they were “let down in many areas of our event” at the last minute “and tried our best to continue on and push through.”
House of Illuminati has not responded to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Connell claimed his contract for the gig was also misspelled, using the word “coonract” at least once in the text. He was also supposed to get a 15-minute break every 45 minutes, but wound up “playing Willy Wonka for three and a half hours straight.”
source: people.com
