Exclusive! Lizzy Caplan Talks About Annie Wilkes in CASTLE ROCK
Alyse Wax
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Castle Rock returns with one of the most iconic villains in Stephen King’s repertoire: Annie Wilkes. The villainess of Misery, portrayed by Kathy Bates in the 1990 movie, will now be played by Lizzy Caplan (Cloverfield). Rather than retelling the Academy Award-winning movie, Castle Rock will give viewers a peek at Annie Wilkes’ origin story. “I tried to put my own spin on it while keeping Kathy Bates’ performance in the back of my mind always,” Caplan told us on the red carpet at the Season 2 premiere. “Because what she did is Annie Wilkes. To me, they are one in the same. So yeah, it’s a super-daunting undertaking, but I’d rather be terrified than let something go because it scares me. There are a lot of boring jobs to be had – who wants that?”
Castle Rock is Hulu’s anthology series set in the Stephen King universe, in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Season 1 dealt with inmates from Shawshank Prison and the niece of Jack Torrance. Season 2 brings us Annie Wilkes before Misery, which includes Annie’s teenage daughter, Joy, played by Elsie Fisher (The Axe Murders of Villisca). “It was a really interesting role to approach because Annie is a very established character, yet we have never heard of Joy before,” Fisher said. “I think [Annie and Joy] have a lot of turmoil going on. Not only does Annie struggle with her own mental problems, it is the town of Castle Rock, so things are bound to not go well.
“At its bones, it is a really loving and special relationship,” Fisher continues. “It’s really apparent from the moments before they enter Castle Rock, and I think it stays true to its foundation throughout the season. But they do deal with a lot.”
And of course, if you want the secrets behind a show, you always go straight to the series creator. In this case, Dustin Thomason:
“Season 2 of Castle Rock is really the origin story of Annie Wilkes, one of the iconic Stephen King villains. When we meet her in Misery, she has a writer locked up in her house, and I always wondered what came before that, what led her to becoming that superfan? Because we’re all superfans, in a way. We’re all Annie Wilkes in a way, and we’re all maybe one step removed from taking our favorite writer and locking them up in our house. For me in particular, it always resonated as a kind of question of fandom and a question of writing. I wanted to explore what her backstory was. So this is the story of what happens when Annie, before those events, crashes into the town of Castle Rock, and sets in motion a chain of events that is unstoppable.
“It was hard to decide where to take Season 2 because there are so many options. In the Stephen King universe, you have sixty books, 500 stories. You could do 150 seasons of Castle Rock. So choosing what you do next is always going to be hard. That said, Annie Wilkes and her backstory is always something Sam [Shaw] and I have been fascinated with from the beginning. It was always a question of when, not if, with Annie. What I loved about the idea of Season 2 was to tell a story about a woman who was kind of a wanderer, and to pair that with a story about a group of people who found their way to Maine, who, in a way, had been pushed out of their homes and had been in search of a different place. So that was the origin of Season 2, to think about the very personal story of a refugee from her own home, and then a political story about refugees from another country.”
Castle Rock Season 2 premieres on Hulu starting October 23rd.
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