“It was the most ‘winging it’ of projects.”
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week or so, you’ve surely at least heard of the infamous Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow.
The experiential event, billed as “the place where chocolate dreams become reality”, took the internet by storm as hundreds of families showed up expecting an incredible show, only to find a sparsely decorated warehouse.
Some images of the hilariously oversold event have since gone viral, including an image of an actress dressed as an Oompa Loompa and a nightmare-inducing new character called ‘The Unknown’.
Irishwoman that went viral at Willy Wonka Experience gives her side of the story
JOE sat down with one of the actors drafted into the event, and it turns out she was none-the-wiser about what she was getting herself into.
Jenny Fogarty from Dublin told us that she was “looking for production design jobs” in Glasgow when she came across a job posting for the event, which was run by organisers House of Illuminati.
“I just thought it would be dressing up as a character handing out sweets, a pretty easy gig for a weekend,” she said. “But that wasn’t the case.”
Jenny revealed that she got hired on the Thursday before the event and was then invited for a costume fitting the next day, only to arrive to no costumes.
“I just assumed like there’d be a lot more done,” she said, giving them the benefit of the doubt. “So they’re going to be here all night. God bless them.”
However, it was only when Jenny saw the warehouse for the first time, that she realised the full extent of the issue.
“We got told the Twilight Tunnel was going to have projections through it. When we showed up in the morning, it just had some mirrors put up and some curtains,” she said. “It was bad.”
Jenny explained that she and the other actors were handed a 15-page “completely AI-generated” script for the next day.
“It was the most ‘winging it’ of projects. I think we all just thought ‘look, we’ll just try our best, get on with the day, see what happens and then never speak of this again.'”
The event was filled with hundreds of disappointed parents and children, who paid around £35 pounds for the experience, promised with the incredible visuals seen on the event’s website.
When they expressed their concerns over how they were going to learn it all in one day, the response was to “just improvise as much as you can”.
“There was a hundreds of people going through expecting a show.
“We did try to do the show and then we got told to scrap it because it was taking too long. I think that’s when it completely just fell off.”
Jenny added that the sweets that they were given to hand out were just “little bags of pick and mix”.
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