Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Neither Warner Bros., which produced Wonka, nor the character Willy Wonka are actually affiliated with the disastrous viral Glasgow event known as Willy’s Chocolate Experience.
It’s an easy mistake to make. Aside from the name, the event featured actors clearly costumed to look like Oompa Loompas. Its chocolatier Willy (last name, inexplicably, “McDuff”) is an eccentric dreamer in a top hat. And the website, which promises “encherining entertainment” alongside “cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops,” and a “pasadise of sweet treats” is clearly courting the sugarcoated whimsy associated with Roald Dahl’s iconic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
The event, put on by a company called House of Illuminati, has garnered headlines worldwide. Parents of devastated kids are campaigning for refunds and have started a Facebook group to swap info. A copy of the event’s fever dream script, which calls for Willy McDuff and his “Wonkidoodles” (not Oompa Loompas) to battle a new villain called “the Unknown,” has been posted online. (WIRED independently verified the script with one of the actors from the event.) Performers worry they’ll never actually get paid.
In the event’s aftermath, WIRED spoke with Paul Connell, the actor and comedian who plays one of the show’s Willy McDuffs. Connell says that amid the unexpected fame Willy’s Chocolate Experience has brought, he and the other actors are also working with the parents to put on a free, proper show for the kids who attended. As for House of Illuminati, the organization says it has no plans to host any future events.
Megan Farokhmanesh: How did you wind up in this situation?
Paul Connell: I’ve asked myself that many times.
I do mainly stand-up comedy, but I will take acting jobs here and there. I saw an acting job to be in this chocolate factory experience. To be fair, I give off Oompa Loompa energy. I don’t give off very Willy Wonka energy. When they cast me as Willy Wonka, that should’ve been the first sign that they didn’t really know what they were doing.
I got the job on Thursday, so like, less than a week ago. I was given a 15-page script, which is just a monologue, to learn for the next day. It was all AI-generated gibberish.
What made you think that it was AI-generated?
Well, you’ve read it, right?
Oh, I’ve read it.
It was all the stuff that just isn’t possible within the realm of humanity. The stuff that just didn’t make any logical sense.
I don’t think they knew what the script said because I was just repeatedly told, do what you want. I think they might have briefly looked at this script enough to have known that they need the costumes. But I don’t think that anyone spent any time studying that script. The guy who did it, Billy Coull, has a series of books on Amazon that are available to buy that have been AI generated. [According to a report in Rolling Stone that quoted an analysis by an AI detection tool, the books were AI generated.]
What else stood out for you in the script?
The funniest bit about the script is the stage directions for the audience. You were supposed to, like, say a line and wait for the audience to, all in unison, lean in before you carried on with the next line. I’m like, right, I’m gonna have to hand out scripts to the audience before this because they need to know their cues as well.
What was your initial impression of the script?
This looks like absolute gibberish. It looks like not even the English language, some parts of this.
But I’m an optimist. It said that there would be special effects and things like that in there. So I just thought, you know what? Maybe I’ll turn up tomorrow and there will be special effects and it will all make sense. I was going to be Willy Wonka. That is a dream. I grew up watching the Gene Wilder [movie]. I absolutely loved that film. I was going to walk into this chocolate kingdom that I am the mayor and ruler of.
I thought it was going to be me having lots of fun with the kids, kids just being excited by everything, there would be chocolate everywhere. By the way, there was no chocolate at the chocolate factory. Instead I was told to hand out two jelly beans and a quarter of a cup of lemonade.
That lemonade is practically legendary now. As is the fact that there weren’t many special effects.
[I thought:] “It will clip into place when I see the projections and the lights and sounds, then I’ll feel so silly, for reading the script and not understanding the deeper meaning behind it.”
But it turns out no there was no deeper meaning. There were no special effects. It was just gibberish that is now in my brain that has probably pushed out something useful.
I’ve looked at the website and I don’t think it actually says anything about Willy Wonka.
Yes, I was Willy McDuff. I should have said that from the beginning. I was not Willy Wonka.
OK, so you’ve got the script for “Willy McDuff.” Tell me more about how it was pitched, versus what you actually showed up to.
I thought it was going to be magic. And then what I did walk into was an empty, cold, dirty warehouse in Glasgow.
Can you tell me your favorite part of the monologue?
I would love to. Oh, yes, my favorite parts. The big part, the part that I really liked because it is actual, nonsensical gibberish was, “There is a man. We do not know his name. We know him only as the Unknown. The Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.”
Now, if that’s not Shakespeare, I don’t know what is, because what does that mean? Does it mean he’s evil and he makes chocolate? Is he a normal guy who makes evil chocolate? Why does he live in the walls? Has he been kicked out of his house?
Excellent questions.
Also, at the end, I was supposed to soak up the Unknown with a giant vacuum cleaner, very Luigi’s Mansion style. There wasn’t a giant vacuum cleaner. I was told by the people running it to improvise, and I didn’t know how to improvise having a vacuum cleaner without a vacuum cleaner. It takes skill that I do not have.
What instruction were you given by the people who hired you?
Instruction, that’s a strong word. I kept saying to them this script makes no sense. What do you want me to do with it? They just kept saying, “Do what you want.” And I was like, yeah, but what I want is to not do this script. So what do you want me to do? And they just kept saying, “Do what you want. Make it up, do the scripts if you want.”
Do you have any sense of how many people were actually organizing the event?
Not enough, is what I would say! I think there were only a handful of people actually organizing it. It was mainly Billy who was in charge of everything. And he clearly was just out of his depth.
It was mad. Seeing the warehouse in the morning, it was like, in what world do you think the kids are going to come through here and not feel like there’s something sinister going on? This is not a magical chocolate world. This is something out of a horror film.
How was this supposed to go? It very much seems like a guided tour to me.
I would come out, I would introduce myself. I would say all those lines about the squirrels being good conversationalists—have you brought your spare socks?
I would do all that, then I would bring them through to the Garden of Enchantment. Or, as I would describe it, some plastic mushrooms in a warehouse. I had a whole speech in which there was supposed to be a lot of tech. There was supposed to be something called Giggle Grass, where if you step on it, it makes you laugh hysterically. I don’t know how they ever thought they were going to pull that off, because how can you make someone laugh hysterically against their will?
I don’t think you should.
So there was supposed to be Giggle Grass. There’s no grass. There was supposed to be something called a Bubble Bloom in which bubbles were supposed to come out of a giant flower, and I was to catch a bubble in my hands and say something about how every bubble holds a dream or wish. And in fact, they had no bubble machine, so that was undoable.
Sorry for laughing.
Then came maybe the most beautiful letdown of the whole event. So [the Twilight Tunnel] was supposed to be this almost Disney World–esque experience where you walk through this dark tunnel with stars. They’re supposed to be dotted about. I was supposed to grab a star, hold it, and have it shoot off my hands. It was supposed to be this magical thing.
This is where the Unknown is revealed, so we have tension as well.
I arrived on the day. I was like, “So what’s going on with this tunnel?” What they’ve done instead of this incredible, magical starlit tunnel is basically just stapled up some chequered flags into a corridor and put some dirty mirrors that I think they must have found in, like, the toilet or something, just along the corridor. This was meant to be the Twilight Tunnel.
Yes, I saw the illustrations on the website.
You’ve probably seen the videos online. That’s where the infamous Unknown character appears from behind a mirror and starts unnecessarily scaring the kids. There’s no need! There is no need to scare the kids that much. They were scared enough.
Then we went through something called the Imagination Lab, which I think the point was that you’re supposed to imagine it was something better. That was where I was to hand out one jelly bean.
Where does the lemonade come in?
The next room was the Lemonade Room, which sounds amazing. It was just some cheap lemonade, in the bottles still, that was poured. You got a quarter of a cup of lemonade, if you were lucky.
That was the experience, me leading everyone through, just talking gibberish, slowly losing my grip on reality.
There’s something so hilarious to me about a single jelly bean. Why did they have you guys only giving out one?
They didn’t buy enough jelly beans! They didn’t even buy enough lemonade! We had to switch to limeade because we ran out! This is the thing that blows my mind. You know how many people are coming. One jelly bean per customer, that’s tight. Wonka’s a tight-fisted old man.
Can you explain to me what exactly is happening in the viral picture of the Oompa Loompa (sorry, Wonkidoodle)? What is she doing? What’s her purpose at that little desk?
I think she was asking herself the same question. It was meant to be a laboratory where the magical beans are made. She was actually doing science, you know, creating the magical beans.
Women in STEM, yeah.
Yes. I do know it looks like a meth lab, but you don’t know how magical beans are made, you know.
Where is the smoke coming from? What was that?
Something was probably on fire. No, I do think they had a smoke machine. But there was one point where we did smell burning and we were worried that something was on fire.
I kept saying throughout the day, “Someone’s going to get hurt.” There was a bouncy castle on a concrete floor! How no kid just went bounce [smack motion] is beyond me.
What was Coull doing during the event as this was all happening?
Walking in circles was all I kind of saw him do. He was just running around—he should have been the Unknown, actually, because he was pretty good at just, like, appearing out of nowhere, whispering in my ear like, “You’re spending too much time with the kids,” and then disappearing into the night.
The day changed about halfway through. I was told to not spend so much time with the kids, try and get everyone through as quickly as possible. That’s when it felt a little gross. Because now it’s like you just want their money. You don’t want these kids to have a good time. They told me to abandon the script. So now what you’ve got is just [the Unknown] in a warehouse unnecessarily scaring the kids without the script. There is no explanation for this. It’s just someone jumping out and scaring children for no reason.
The parents were getting angry. The kids were crying. I mean, you don’t know heartbreak until you’ve seen a small girl dressed as an Oompa Loompa crying and holding one jelly bean. That might be the saddest image I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s what I see when I close my eyes at night.
So, I went on a lunch break and sat in my car and just thought about how many bad decisions I’ve made. And then when I went back to the event, there was a mob of people, angry, shouting, wanting refunds, wanting Billy [Coull]’s head on a stick.
People were shouting. People were chasing him around the venue with their phones going, “I’ve got you on camera.” The other person who was running the event with him, she was crying. The actors just stood around kind of being like, “What do we do?” We’ve been told that the event was canceled. So I went over to the actors and went, “Should we go to the pub?” Which is what we did, we went to the pub. Let’s just let all this die down.
That’s understandable.
At the end of the day, we didn’t organize this. We did the best we could. We deserve a drink. And when we came back from the pub, we saw police were there, two police vans and two squad cars. I think the threat of violence had become quite high. How no one was hurt is unbelievable. Really. Because [Coull] is probably one of the most disliked people in Glasgow right now.
I think the police had to come, to basically stop someone from getting hurt. And my chocolate factory was no more.
