A quick recap for those of you who have missed out: Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow, Scotland promised to be a whimsical, immersive, family event. While it was not affiliated with the beloved Roald Dahl novel or any of the films based on it, organizers got as close as they legally could to claiming some kind of connection. They used colorful and whimsical AI-generated art to sell tickets, but the result was something more along the lines of “Fyre Fest for Kids.”
The saga continues to unfold with actor Paul Connell, who played Willy Wonka, offering his side of the story.
What attendees got was a sparely decorated warehouse with several performers who were woefully unprepared. The event was such a disappointment that the police were called and everyone was issued a refund.
Connell claims he was given the script for his leading role on Thursday evening, just two days before the start of the event. “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things,” he explains in a series of TikToks. “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.”
To be fair, Wonka tends to speak in riddles so Connell wrote it off and expected it to make more sense once he was actually at the venue. Hoping that the dialogue would click once he saw the wondrous sets and projections being advertised. Alas, this did not happen and he got the same dingey warehouse as everyone else.
Unsurprisingly, he says management didn’t seem to fully understand what was happening or what the actors should do. So he did what any professional would do and tried to make it work for the sake of the kids. However, he had to take some huge creative leaps to do so since a lot of basic materials were lacking. Harping on the fact that kids were given just one jelly bean and a quarter of a cup of Tesco brand lemonade. You’d think given the name Willy’s Chocolate Experience there would be some chocolate, but no.
“At the end of my monologue, I was supposed to suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner,” Connell said. “I asked them if they had a vacuum cleaner and they said ‘yeah we haven’t really got there yet so just improvise that.’ I can’t improvise a vaccum cleaner. You either have a vaccum cleaner or you don’t have a vaccum cleaner.”
He has no defense for Willy’s Chocolate Experience, but says his co-stars were also doing all that they could. “All the actors, lovely people, we gathered together in the morning 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’.”
A difficult task given not only the dreary setting but also because he was denied 15-minute breaks. Resulting in him playing Wonka for three and a half hours straight. “I didn’t know where I ended and Wonka began. I was losing my mind by that point.”
On top of the burnout he was being pushed to move kids “through as quickly as possible’.” Along with being chastised for spending too much time with them. Because the £35 ($44) price tag apparently didn’t include some face time with the fictitious candy maker.
When he finally got a break, he sat in his car trying to avoid looking at the disappointed faces of parents and children. By the time Connell finished his break all hell had broken loose at Willy’s Chocolate Experience. A mob has formed demanding answers as to how the event turned out so abysmal.
“People were shouting, people who put on the event were crying,” Connell describes. “There were arguments, people running around everywhere – the set had been trashed.” With heavy hearts, the actors eventually decided to just leave.
“I’m really shocked that the event had fallen short of the expectations of people on paper,” Willy’s Chocolate Experience organizer Billy Coull, the director of immersive events company House of Illuminati, told STV News. “My vision of the artistic rendition of a well known book didn’t come to fruition. For that I am absolutely truly and utterly sorry.”
House of Illuminati has issued refunds on all tickets and has shut down further sales. We’ll keep you posted on updates about this dumpster inferno as it continues to blaze.
You can check out Connell’s TikToks below:
