Bringing any beloved character to life can be a daunting task for a performer, made all the more difficult when someone else has already made their mark on the character, though Misery star Kathy Bates recently shared her love for Lizzy Caplan‘s take on Annie Wilkes for Hulu’s Castle Rock, noting that the actress makes the character both “terrifying and human.” Not only is Bates’ power as a performer strong enough praise for Caplan, but Bates won an Academy Award for playing the character in the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery. Bates also shared her love for the performance during a red carpet appearance.
‘I LOVE HER’: @MsKathyBates, who won an #Oscar for playing #AnnieWilkes in #Misery, is a big fan of #LizzyCaplan‘s portrayal of the character in her youth in #CastleRock (@castlerockhulu) pic.twitter.com/9KD0juzuWs
— AP Entertainment (@APEntertainment) November 22, 2019
“Oh, God, I love her. I sent her flowers,” Bates recalled to the AP. “I’ve watched every episode, she’s magnificent. Love her, love her.”
Earlier in the day, Bates had tweeted that Caplan “hits it out of the park. She IS Annie Wilkes. Terrifying and human. Sometimes she makes me feel all oogie!”
In Season Two of the series, a feud between warring clans comes to a boil when budding psychopath Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan), Stephen King’s nurse from hell, gets waylaid in Castle Rock. While the first season of the series focused more on characters on the outskirts of King’s iconic Maine town, this season puts iconic characters and locations at the forefront of an all-new story.
As far as how Caplan came to embody the iconic character, showrunner Dustin Thomason previously revealed that the idea started back when Caplan was watching the first season.
“When [co-creator] Sam [Shaw] and I first talked about the show, the idea, before Season One even, of doing an Annie Wilkes origin story always felt like one of the most exciting things and chapters to fill in,” Thomason shared with ComicBook.com. “In a way, we had been thinking about it for a long time. And then, actually, I don’t know if anyone knows this, but Lizzy, during Season One, emailed Sam to tell him that she was really enthusiastic about the show, because they had worked together on something else. And so, in a way, I think the conversation began all the way back during Season One, at least in our minds.”
He continued, “When I started thinking about Season Two as the Annie Wilkes origin story that we had been trying to tell all along, Lizzy was the first name that came to the forefront. I guess it was a happy accident, and it was maybe in a story about a woman who is a big fan, it was fun to cast somebody who was actually a fan of Season One without having any connection to it.”
New episodes of Castle Rock debut on Hulu on Wednesdays.
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