Rebecca Wisocky Teases a Big Change for Hetty in the 'Ghosts' Christmas Special Episode
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The ghosts of 'Ghosts' are in the Christmas spirit in more ways than one.
Portraying Hetty Woodstone, the matriarch of the hit CBS series Ghosts has involved a great deal of period research, learning to move in a constricting corset, and becoming part of a beloved group of actors who feel like family members.
This is why Rebecca Wisocky is so excited about the upcoming one-hour Christmas episode—affectionately called "Ghostsmas" that is airing on CBS on Thursday, Dec. 15, at 8 p.m. ET.
Inspired by the romantic comedies that she adores, Sam (Rose McIver), who is Hetty’s distant relative, makes it her goal to spark a holiday romance between Jay’s sister Bela (Punam Patel) and her platonic male friend. The ghosts come up with a very different holiday plan that also involves Bela.
Playing the deceased lady of the manor, Wisocky says that taking a deep dive into the 1800s and getting up close and personal with Hetty Woodstone has been a true pleasure.
Related: Everything We Know About Season 2 of Ghosts
“Hetty is often ridiculous and gets things wrong a lot. I find this extremely funny and also fun to play. In Season 2, she discovers a sense of sexual and female empowerment that she will take a little bit possibly too far,” Wisocky exclusively tells Parade.com.
Wisocky added that the ensemble in Ghosts bonded extremely quickly, and she believes that this is a major reason that the CBS show is such a hit.
“It’s nice to be proud of what you do,” she adds. “I think it’s not just an added bonus that we all love each other, and it’s one of the reasons that the show really works. That family chemistry is something you can’t fake.”
Read on for why Rebecca Wisocky loves the family atmosphere of Ghosts and what she is learning from Hetty.
What do you love about Ghosts?
Rebecca Wisocky: I love that it is a family. It is, of course, figuratively a family; we’re all trapped in this home and have no choice but to be stuck with one another. This is the blessing and the curse of a family. We have turned into a family offscreen as well, as we’re all up here in Montreal away from our regular lives for six months at a time. It just so happens that we’ve all become deep, close, fast friends. I think you can see that kind of chemistry on screen.
Let’s talk more about the one-hour Christmas special.
The Christmas episode has got everything. I was thinking, "What’s the main thrust of this episode I should talk about?" And honestly, it’s a love letter to Rose McIver. She’s so well known for her Christmas Prince movies, and she is a Christmas spirit maniac in real life.
The writers Joe Port, Joe Wiseman and Emily Schmidt wrote these two episodes. There are a lot of little Easter eggs in there that are tributes to Rose and some of the other members of the cast. But yeah, she’s our "Ghosts Momma."
Rose is incredibly talented and such a wonderful leader. I would call her the heart of our show. I can’t say enough good things about her, and this double-header episode really gives her a chance to shine. I won’t give any spoilers, but it gives her a chance to shine in a brand new way that I think the fans are really going to love and that she really deserves. I’m excited for people to see it.
Francis Specker CBS
What's the best part of the Ghosts Christmas episode?
Ghosts will provoke conversation, it’s delightful and silly and smart. I think it looks like a film, it’s shot and lit and designed beautifully. It’s smart comedy and it’s fun, what do you have to lose?
In terms of the Christmas episode, I mean, come on! We've got snow, we've got mistletoe, we've got caroling, smooching, and log splitting. We’ve got a crazy ghost scheme that goes horribly wrong. And as I teased earlier, we have a very special Hanukkah miracle by the end.
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Talk about how you see Hetty and how she has evolved for you.
Well, she started off, and presumably was this way for over 100 years, a very uptight stick in the mud. Very much clinging to the social codes, gender codes and class codes of her society in New York in the late 1800s. She lived a rather loveless life under the thumb of her husband.
In death, and only through her relationships with the other ghosts, particularly the female ghosts, she has started to shed some of those notions and is slowly becoming a little bit of a feminist.
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That rather sensual washing machine episode was hysterical.
It was so fun to play. She’s also so verbal. The writers give her these beautiful speeches and all these great one-liners that are such a delight to play as an actor. Some of my favorite moments with Hetty are when she’s reacting and taking in what’s going on in the background, or those moments of physical comedy like when she was on top of the washing machine. You can tell a whole story without saying a word. Those are moments that I also enjoy playing.
How much research did you do, or are you doing to do, to understand the 1800s?
Quite a bit. I think all of us are involved in this. The writers have been very responsive to us throwing in little things, little tidbits that we find along the way. It’s important, this show is first and foremost a delightful family comedy. It’s silly and zany but it has really wonderful, teachable, sweet moments as well. And it was important to all of us that, as so many of the ghosts represent fraught periods in American history, that we deal with those with a degree of knowledge and responsibility. I think the writers have been really great about that, so yes.
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Bertrand Calmeau/CBS
Your show took off very quickly. When did you and your co-stars realize Ghosts was a hit?
Well, the funny thing is we’re in this bubble shooting the show up in Montreal, so I’m not sure we’ve even completely experienced it yet. I’ve been a character actor, a working actor thankfully, for just about 30 years now. I can’t even wrap my mind around what it means that 10 million people watched our Season 2 premiere. That’s craziness to me. So, I’m so grateful that it’s found an audience. I think the reason that so many people are watching is that people can watch together as families. There’s something for everybody, that’s what we’re hearing at least.
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Talk about wearing the same costume for every episode. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I love it. It has its ups and downs. It’s horribly uncomfortable, but the ways in which it’s uncomfortable are also the ways that help me a great deal as an actor. I can’t raise my arms above a certain height. I’m wearing a corset and that affects the way I breathe and how I walk. All of those things for an actor are really useful tools. I’ll take the discomfort because I think the dress is beautiful, I feel very lucky to wear it and it’s wonderful never to need a costume fitting.
Do you believe in ghosts or spirits or any of these things?
Yes, I think I do. You’d think I’d have a better answer to that question by now. But yeah, I believe in the history of places and objects. Specifically, I like thinking about the house itself, the Woodstone Mansion, is kind of the 11th main character in our show. And our production designer Zoe Sakellaropoulo is a genius and has done such a beautiful job layering all the lives of the people and generations of people that have inhabited this home.
That really resonates with me. That this home is haunted by all the people that have lived there, loved there, dreamt there and died there. That is very, very moving to me and that’s the thing that resonates with me. I believe in the spirits and the legacy of people that inhabit places. The Woodstone Mansion is layered with those kinds of stories and messages.
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What else are you looking forward to for Ghosts and Hetty in future episodes?
Well, I don’t want to spoil anything, but something rather shocking happens for Hetty within the Christmas episode that I think people might not see coming. And it will kick off a new, different trajectory and put into high gear her female awakening this year.
Bertrand Calmeau/CBS
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Do you think Sam’s husband Jay will ever see or hear the ghosts, and should he?
Well, that’s a very interesting question, I don’t know. My writer brain can conceive of interesting potential ideas years down the road, but for now, I think they made a very smart decision. As much as Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) would have loved to play with us and talk to us more, I think the writers made a very smart decision keeping that dynamic of Sam being the one that can see us and hear us and Jay being trapped outside.
But one of my favorite things is that he’s not skeptical, he’s 100 percent on board. He reacts the way I would hope my husband would react if I told him that a house is full of ghosts. He’s all on board and is perhaps more geeked out by it than she is.
Right, and they do interact. I mean, in the Dungeons & Dragons episode Jay and the ghosts were playing together with Sam’s help.
There are more interesting, clever ways that Jay gets to interact with us as the season goes on. Yeah, I won’t spoil it more than that, but there are some fun, exciting things that happen.
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I love how Jay is so supportive of Sam, especially with all of the ghost-related issues in the series.
I can certainly relate. I have a supportive husband, Lap Chi Chu, who is a fantastic Broadway lighting designer. Among several other shows next year, he is doing a new version of Camelot at Lincoln Center. Aaron Sorkin is writing the book for it.
Please share a few holiday traditions, either from your childhood or your adulthood, or things that you really look forward to.
I love cooking. I love how we’ll be back in our home with family and having friends over. Yeah, just a house full of people, the sound of football on the TV, music and a big pot of soup on the stove. Pretty simple desires, but we always did a big Christmas tree. I still have all of the Christmas decorations from when I was a kid, all those little homemade things. Yeah, pretty simple, but just being around loved ones with lots of food in the kitchen.
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What life lessons, again without giving spoilers, do you think we get from Ghosts?
I think sadly many of these ghosts, and many of the characters in Ghosts didn’t really get a chance to live until after they died. And perhaps that’s something that there’s a lesson there, to try not to live with regret or with fear. Yeah, and I think there are some wonderful lessons of representation as well.
Hetty, for example, only finds change through lessons that she learns through Alberta (Danielle Pinnock), Flower (Sheila Carrasco) or Sam, none of whom would she have ever, known in her own life or her own time. I think that’s true for all of the ghosts. We learn lessons from one another that weren’t possible for us in our lives because we didn’t know those people. We weren’t privy to those points of view and I think there’s a really lovely lesson there.
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Bertrand Calmeau/CBS
Talk about the BBC show that Ghosts is based on.
Many of us were big fans of the original version, the BBC version, which I don’t know if you’ve seen, but it’s a wonderful series. The people that created that are also executive producers on our show, that core group. And we were all very concerned that people that loved that show would not at all like ours—those across-the-pond adaptations, they either really work or they don’t.
I think when we heard early on that some of our biggest fans were a group of original BBC fans, a group of young viewers in the U.K. were some of our most vocal fans and have contributed lots of fan art and stuff online, that’s when we thought, “Okay, we have something,” especially if we can win over those people who are very loyal to the BBC version.
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You’ve had a very rich and diverse career. What are some highlights you would like to point out?
I feel very lucky that I’ve been offered a real breadth of roles. It’s not just been comedy or drama; I’ve been lucky enough to do some stage roles that I’m very proud of.
I started my career touring with a dance theater company, so yeah, I’ve done a lot of different things. The thing that jumps to mind is the other series that people know me for, which is Devious Maids, which I had so much fun doing. Which was similar to a big family.
Oh boy, it’s hard to choose though. I’m an old-school journeyman character actor. I always just simply feel lucky to have a job, period. And with Ghosts, to have a job that is this much fun, that people are enjoying this much is a dream come true!
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Do you and your co-stars stay in touch when you’re back in Los Angeles and everybody’s dispersed?
Amazingly we really can’t stay away from each other. Yes, we are in contact all the time. I mean, up in Montreal, every weekend we spend with each other. We had a big Thanksgiving, 20 people over at Richie Moriarty’s house last weekend. When we go back to LA and to New York, we’ll all continue hanging out. It really is a big, happy family, and it’s been one of the greatest pleasures of my career and honestly, of my life, spending this much time with this group of people.
The one-hour special Ghosts Christmas episode airs on CBS Thursday, Dec. 15, from 8 to 9 p.m. ET and streams on Paramount+.
Next, check out the best and funniest quotes from your favorite Christmas movies.
