Willy Wonka Experience actor speaks out about event that left him crying in his car

Remember the name Paul Connell. You’ll almost definitely hear from the 31-year-old comedian again when the inevitable warring documentaries about disastrous Scottish popup Willy’s Chocolate Experience—a.k.a. Fyre Fest for kids—finally come out.

For the past 48 hours, the internet has been captivated (or perhaps gazing in abject horror) at a mostly empty warehouse in Glasgow where parents unknowingly brought their kids to be terrorized by a Babadook knockoff and receive a small glass of lemonade and a single jellybean for their troubles. The scam was advertised by a group called “House of Illuminati,” which made a lot of big promises using entirely A.I. generated gibberish. If all went according to plan, guests could have experienced “cartchy tuns,” “exarserdray lollipops,” or even “a pasadise of sweet teats.”

But all did not go according to plan. Children cried, parents screamed, and police were eventually called to the scene as frustrated ticket holders desperately sought refunds amidst the chaos.

Now, Willy Wonka himself—a.k.a. Paul Connell—is finally breaking his silence. “I got a phone call on Thursday saying, ‘Congratulations you are going to play Willy Wonka,’” Connell told The Independent in a groundbreaking interview, wherein he admitted that “the script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things.”

Still, Connell tried to stay the course. The real Willy with his many tests would have been proud. “The bit that got me was where I had to say, ‘There is a man we don’t know his name. We know him as the Unknown. This Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls,’” he shared. Hence, the terrifying Babadook. “They even misspelt my contract but I do have a legally binding ‘Coontract’ [sic],… but I stayed up all night learning it, thinking this would make sense in the dress rehearsal when I see all the tech.”

He was wrong, of course. “In some ways, it was a world of imagination, like imagine that there is a whole chocolate factory here,” he said. (Someone real, please hire this guy!) It seems organizers hadn’t even read their own, physically impossible script. At one point, Connell was supposed to “suck up the Unknown Man with a vacuum cleaner.” When he asked if they even had a vacuum cleaner, he got: “yeah, we haven’t really got there yet, so just improvise.”

The actor went on to confirm that there was, indeed, no chocolate at the chocolate factory experience, and he was forced to play Wonka for three and a half hours straight although he had been promised breaks every 45 minutes. When he did finally snag one, he apparently spent it crying in his car. “It was heartbreaking, to be honest. There were kids in costume better than ours, crying. I used to be a teacher and that was triggering for me.”

Connell did specify that “everyone has been so nice to the actors” who they knew weren’t responsible, but the actors “gave abuse to the people running it. The whole thing was disrespectful to the families and us as promising actors.”

Connell isn’t the only actor to speak out. In a new Facebook group titled “house of illuminati scam,” other Oompa Loompas and the like have chimed in, claiming their contracts were signed in “erasable ink” and that they “doubt any of us will receive a penny.” For Connell’s part, he just wishes he could move on. “It’s a night I’ll try to forget,” he concluded. “Sadly, not only will I remember it, everyone I know will remember it too.”