Castle Rock season 2 offers 'different insight' into Misery villain Annie Wilkes
Misery‘s psychopathic nurse Annie Wilkes is one of Stephen King‘s most memorable characters, cemented by Kathy Bates‘ Oscar-winning portrayal in the 1990 film adaptation. But the new season of Hulu’s King-inspired anthology series Castle Rock is about to cast the iconic villain in a new light.
Lizzy Caplan stars as a younger Wilkes in the series’ upcoming second season (with Eighth Grade breakout Elsie Fisher as her daughter), contending with her deteriorating mental state in the town of Castle Rock. When the show’s cast dropped by EW’s video suite at New York Comic Con, Caplan teased the season’s new spin on the character: “I think we hopefully will give you a different insight into the Annie Wilkes you know and love from the past,” she said.
Also teased? The return of Shawshank Redemption star Tim Robbins to the Stephen King universe (playing patriarch Reginald “Pop” Merrill), the “current-day themes” of the new season, and the potential reappearance of characters from season 1.
“The idea of the show was always that we were going to return to certain threads, and that over the course of many seasons we’d be building this giant Stephen King tapestry,” co-creator Dustin Thomason said. “So like Stephen does with his books, people will pop back up in unexpected places.”
The cast also weighed in on what other King stories they would like to appear in (Caplan picked Shawshank, so she could hang out with a young Robbins), with Fisher joking that she’d play the titular mad dog in Cujo through the same CGI as Tom Hooper’s Cats — an image arguably more terrifying than anything King has come up with.
Season 2 of Castle Rock will arrive on Hulu Oct. 23. Watch EW’s full interview with the cast above.
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