This week’s breath of levity has been the whole Willy Wonka Experience gone wrong. To recap, an event in Whiteinch, Glasgow called “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” was marketed to families as an “immersive experience” into the world of Willy Wonka. Pictures and advertisements promised attendees that they’d view paradise. Except, it was all a scam. They were promised paradise but ended up being the Kidz Bop version of Fyre Fest. The venue was basically an empty warehouse with some low budget decorations and dejected-looking performers. But worst of all, there was NO chocolate!

BBC Radio did an interview with Paul Connell, the actor who played Willy Wonka. During the interview, he explained that the experience on the backend wasn’t very pleasant either. The production company who organized the event, House of Illuminati, hired the actors merely a few days beforehand, gave them a script of AI-generated “gibberish,” and basically left them up to their own devices to improvise the rest.

Mr Connell, originally from Hull, told BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland programme: “It was very disappointing to see how many people turned up at this event and found basically me dressed up as Willy Wonka in a half-abandoned warehouse. It was not what I was expecting. I was offered the part on the Thursday, given 15 pages of AI generated gibberish to learn and then obviously turned up and saw what it was.”

Mr Connell said he and other actors were unsure if they would be paid, but still wanted to provide the best experience for the children. He added: “The actors were furious, we’d been conned as well and it did turn quite scary at one point because people were angry. There was lots of shouting and groups of people getting very, very irate.”

Mr Connell said despite the circumstances, the performers received good feedback online for trying their best to “make the best out of a bad situation”.

He said he spoke to the organisers during the event, but had not been in contact with them since.

“I asked them what they wanted me to do as a performer and they just kept saying, ‘do whatever you want’. Every conversation I had with them was them running around very stressed, very panicked throughout the day.”

House of Illuminati, said in a post on Facebook it was “truly sorry” and had been let down in “many areas” and tried their best to continue. It said it would be giving a full refund to anyone who bought a ticket. It added in a later post: “This was an event gone wrong. The House of Illuminati will not be holding any other event in the foreseeable future.”

[From BBC]

OMG, just imagine the level of “WTF did I get myself into?” that those actors must have experienced at that moment. Between the AI-generated ads and script, the horrible decorations, and the lack of direction for the performers, this was the laziest attempt at a grift ever. At least Paul had a good balance of empathy and humor about the whole ordeal. In a charming interview with Australia’s The Project, Paul describes the AI-generated gibberish in more detail, including the inclusion of an “evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls” called the Unknown. The actor playing this part wore a black cloak and a scary mask and would just randomly jump out and scare kids for no reason. The whole thing is just wild. (Note: His description and a video of this Unknown character starts at 1:14. It’s amazing.)

Oh, and for those who have a vested interest in the sad Oompa Loompa from that viral picture or need to know more about the whole “two jellybeans and a half cup of lemonade” thing, the actress from the photo, Kirsty Paterson, told Vulture the backstory:

In the exact moment of the photo, they’d told us to abandon the script. They had this “Jellybean Room,” but they eventually ran out of jelly beans. I was already rationing the jelly beans to three per kid, and that was me being generous. I wanted to give the kids all the candy. So we had no jelly beans, and people were coming up to me. It was just humiliating. I was starting to get angry. The other Oompa Loompa came over at this point and I went, “Where is everyone?! Why am I left here on my own?! Where is everyone else?!” You know how they talk about “me contemplating my life”? This is me contemplating my life.

Well, as terrible as the whole ordeal must have been at the time, at least actors like Paul and Kirsty are getting their 15 minutes of fame and a chance for more exposure. And Kirsty will forever live in the zeitgeist of Internet memes! One day, AI will be generating that sad Oompa Loompa picture whenever someone asks it to pull up an image of the personification of “FML.”

Note by CB: The Oompa Loompa Girls are doing fine! Here’s a link to the sad Oompa Loompa Kirsty Paterson’s TikTok. She’s also met up with Paul Connell! Here’s a link to his TikTok.

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Photos credit: Jennifer Fogarty and Kirsty Paterson via Instagram and via Twitter