Hulu’s acclaimed anthology series Castle Rock, inspired by the works of Stephen King, has officially announced its Season 2 premiere date.
Season 2 has cultural and racial tensions mount when a Somalian family moves into the eponymous coastal town, worsened by the arrival of Annie Wilkes, the infamously deranged villain of King’s classic novel Misery; Wilkes will be portrayed by Lizzy Caplan.
Season 2 of Castle Rock stars Lizzy Caplan, Tim Robbins, Elsie Fisher, Paul Sparks, Barkhad Abdi, Yusra Warsama and Matthew Alan. It premieres on Hulu on Oct. 23.
Hulu releases details on ‘Castle Rock‘ Season 2. Season 2 of Hulu’s “Castle Rock” will have ties to Stephen King’s 1987 psychological horror novel, “Misery,” and other King works, while remaining an original story set in the author’s universe.The next season of Hulu’s Stephen King mash-up Castle Rock is going to start expanding its references to beyond the borders of its eponymous New England town, with Lizzy Caplan joining the cast as noted literature fan Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates’ character from Misery). Now, Hulu has released a very brief teaser for the new season that reveals that it will premiere on October 23, though even “teaser” is a generous term for this thing. It’s somewhere between a picture of a logo and a video of someone holding holding up the logo and saying “You can watch it on October 23.” It’s mostly just a logo flying at the screen, but in a spooky way
Paul Sparks, a character actor best known for roles in Boardwalk Empire and Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience, has signed on to play town bully Ace Merrill in the upcoming season of the Stephen King-inspired anthology series.
Sparks, whose credits also include HBO’s The Night Of and Netflix’s House Of Cards, will portray Ace, the nephew of local loan shark Pop Merrill–played by Stephen King vet Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption). With Pop approaching retirement, Ace is primed to take over his uncle’s business interests, but his promotion has troubling implications for the town’s relationship with nearby Jerusalem’s Lot. Sparks joins a cast that includes Lizzy Caplan as Annie Wilkes (the psychopathic super-fan from Misery) and Elsie Fisher as Annie’s daughter (a new character created for the series), along with Barkhad Abdi, Matthew Alan, and Yusra Warsama. Season two will take place amidst an escalating battle between local families, exacerbated by the arrival of a troubled woman named Annie Wilkes.
Castle Rock combines “the mythological scale and intimate character storytelling of King’s best-loved works, weaving an epic saga of darkness and light, played out on a few square miles of Maine woodland.
Season 1 episode 9 & 10
9 Henry Deaver”
The Kid reveals to Molly that he is Henry Deaver, the biological son of Ruth and Pastor Matthew from an alternate reality. In a flashback in the Kid’s universe, Ruth followed through on leaving her troubled husband in 1991, taking her child and fleeing to Boston. After they left, the Pastor was not murdered by 12-year-old Molly, but did find 12-year-old black Henry who went missing in 1991 in his reality. In 2018, this Pastor Deaver commits suicide, and grown white Henry finds the adopted Henry in a cage in the basement. White adult Henry and his Molly talk to adopted Henry, who insists the voices are calling him to the woods. When Molly touches his hand, she sees the first 12 years of the Molly and Henry of his reality. Molly and white Henry take adopted Henry to the woods near Castle Lake, where they see people from centuries of multiple realities. Molly is accidentally killed, adopted Henry returns to his reality, and white Henry follows him, becoming the Kid.
10 “Romans”
Molly explains to Henry what she has learned from The Kid regarding their intersecting lives and realities. Henry and The Kid are arrested as suspects in the flurry of deaths. In jail, The Kid tells Henry that bad follows him because he is an anomaly to this reality, and that they must go together to Castle Lake before the sounds, signifying the realities are touching, disappear. More strange deaths occur, leading to some Shawshank inmates slaughtering civilians and officers at the Castle Rock jail. Henry and The Kid escape in the confusion, with The Kid forcing Henry, at gunpoint, to Castle Lake. Henry starts to remember his experience with his father in 1991, including the fact that he pushed Preacher Deaver off a cliff for planning to kill his mother, Ruth. Henry overpowers The Kid. One year later, Henry is living in Castle Rock as a property lawyer, Molly is a successful real estate agent in the Florida Keys and The Kid is imprisoned in the now-abandoned Shawshank. In a mid-credits scene, Jackie talks to Dean Merrill about the book she is writing and her plans to travel west to research her family history.
Season 2[edit]
- Lizzy Caplan as Annie Wilkes, a nurse dealing with mental issues who gets stuck in Castle Rock.
- Tim Robbins as Reginald “Pop” Merrill, the dying head of the Merrill crime family.
- Paul Sparks as John “Ace” Merrill, Pop’s nephew who stands to take over the family business.
- Elsie Fisher as Joy Wilkes, Annie’s daughter.
- Yusra Warsama as Dr. Nadia Omar, a Somali doctor employed as the Medical director at the hospital in Jerusalem’s Lot.
- Barkhad Abdi as Abdi Omar, Nadia’s older brother who wants to strengthen Somali ties in their community.
- Matthew Alan as Chris Merrill, Ace’s brother who finds himself stuck between the feud between the Merrills and the Somali community.
- John Hoogenakker as “a man with a complicated connection to [Annie] Wilkes”[3]
- Ruby Cruz as young Annie Wilkes.
Anne Marie Wilkes Dugan, usually known as Annie Wilkes, is the main antagonist in the 1987 novel Misery, by Stephen King. In the 1990 film adaptation of the novel, Annie Wilkes was portrayed by Kathy Bates, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal. The American Film Instituteincluded Annie Wilkes (as played by Bates) in their “100 Heroes and Villains” list, ranking her as the 17th most iconic villain (and sixth most iconic villainess) in film history. A nurse by training, she has become one of the stereotypes of the nurse as a torturer and Angel of mercy.
The novel provides Wilkes’ backstory, stating that she was born in Bakersfield, California, on April 1, 1943 and graduated from the University of Southern California’s nursing school in 1966. After several years of working in hospitals across the country, she settled in a remote portion of Colorado’s Western Slope.
In both the book and movie, Wilkes rescues protagonist Paul Sheldon after he breaks both of his legs in a car accident, and takes him to her home to convalesce. She fawns over Sheldon, a writer of romance novels starring her favorite literary character, Misery Chastain; she professes to be his “number one fan” and says that she loves him. She also implies that she has visited the hotel where Sheldon finishes his novels as he was staying there. These statements, and the fact that she is not in a hurry to take him to a hospital, make Sheldon uneasy. He has studied psychological disorders as part of his research for the Misery series, and suspects early on that Wilkes is mentally unstable.
Wilkes is furious when she discovers Sheldon killed off Misery at the end of his latest novel. She tells him she has not called a hospital or told anybody about him and makes a veiled threat on his life. She holds him captive in her home and subjects him to a series of physical and psychological tortures. She also forces him to burn the only copy of a novel he felt would put him back on track as a mainstream author, and then makes him write a new novel bringing Misery back to life. Sheldon writes the book as Wilkes wants, but bridles at her treatment of him and manages to sneak out of his room several times while she’s away.
On one of his trips out of his room, Sheldon finds Wilkes’ old scrapbook and learns from the newspaper clippings inside that she is a serial killer whose spree dates back to her childhood in Bakersfield. Among her victims were a neighboring family, her own father, her college roommate, and a hitchhiker with whom she had a brief fling. Sheldon also learns that she killed several patients at other hospitals where she worked. However, while serving as head maternity nurse at a hospital in Boulder, eleven infants in her care died under mysterious circumstances. She was tried for their deaths, but acquitted due to lack of evidence. Sheldon also finds that Wilkes was formerly married to a physical therapist named Ralph Dugan, who later divorced her, citing “mental cruelty”. The last picture is an article about Sheldon’s own disappearance, leading him to fear that he is Wilkes’ next victim.
Sheldon doesn’t know it, but Wilkes has known all along that he has been sneaking around her house. This sets off one of the film’s most infamous scenes, in which she breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer to stop him from escaping. In the book, she chops off his foot with an axe and cauterizes it with a blowtorch and later cuts off one of his thumbs with an electric knife when he complains about a missing letter on his typewriter (this never happens in the film).
In the book, Wilkes brutally murders a Colorado state trooper who sees Sheldon in her house by stabbing him with a wooden cross and running him over with a lawnmower. In the film, the local sheriff comes to Wilkes’ farm to investigate Sheldon’s disappearance. Wilkes drugs Sheldon and hides him in her basement before subsequently killing the officer by shooting him in the back with a double-barreled shotgun when he hears Sheldon’s cries for help.
Wilkes then says they should “celebrate” the new novel in a murder–suicide. Sheldon pretends to go along with it, telling her he needs a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne and a cigarette, as per his usual practice after finishing a book. He soaks the manuscript with lighter fluid he picked up in the basement and sets it ablaze. While Wilkes tries to put the fire out, Sheldon overpowers her by cracking her over the head with his typewriter and choking her. In the film, he chokes her with pages of the burnt novel. In the book, he chokes her with blank pages which she believes to be the book; the real novel is hidden from sight and was later published.
She ultimately dies of a fractured skull; Sheldon is then rescued by police. In the book, she fractures her skull when she slips and falls against the mantle of the guest room bed. When the police go in to search the bedroom where Wilkes is believed to have died, they find it empty. It is later revealed that, despite being mortally wounded, she managed to escape the bedroom and died in her barn with her hands on a chainsaw, which she presumably intended to use on Sheldon. In the movie, Sheldon kills her by ramming a metal statue of her pet sow pig – named Misery after his stories – into her head.
Annie Wilkes as a cunning, brutal and devious woman who hides her malice behind a cheery façade. Both the novel and the film portray her as extremely paranoid, and also suggest that she may suffer from bipolar disorder. In the novel, she has day-long bouts with depression, during which she is seen maiming herself; Sheldon also finds evidence that she gorges herself on vast quantities of food. She has an unhealthy obsession with romance novels, particularly Sheldon’s Misery series.
She abhors profanity, to the point that she will fly into fits of rage if it is used in front of her. She instead expresses anger with childishly strange words and phrases like “cockadoodie”, “mister man”, “dirty bird”, “dirty birdy”, “oogie”, “fiddely-foof” and “rooty-patooties”. In the novel, however, she lets more conventional profanities slip on occasion. She has violent tantrums over insignificant matters. For instance, when Sheldon complains that the packet of Eaton’s Corrasable Bond paper she bought for him is smudge-prone, she smashes his still-healing knee; in the book, when he mentions that her typewriter is missing a key, she cuts off his thumb.
A version of Annie Wilkes will appear in the TV series Castle Rock, and will be portrayed by Lizzy Caplan.
| Nickname | Dragon Lady |
|---|---|
| Gender | Female |
| Occupation | Nurse (formerly) Serial killer |
| Family | Carl Wilkes (father) Nancy Wilkes (mother) Paul Wilkes (brother) |
| Spouse | Ralph Dugan (divorced) |
Jinx 