Castle Rock Season 2 is so much more than an origin story for Stephen King’s Misery

Culturess spoke with the cast of Castle Rock Season 2 about how it will focus on Stephen King’s classics Misery and Salem’s Lot. And so much more.

Though Annie Wilkes has a reputation for being an over the edge killer, she wasn’t wholly evil in the movie Misery, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. In it, Wilkes originally came off as naive and somewhat sweet, though she proved more than once that she could freefall right into being deranged. Paul Sheldon found this out every time conversations between them escalated, leaving her full of rage until she released her wrath. Sheldon’s legs felt the brunt of that fury on most occasions. We later discover through Sheldon’s snooping that Wilkes had been killing people for years as a nurse.

Season 2 of Castle Rock welcomes a young Annie Wilkes, who has temporarily moved into this new town with her daughter. We will finally see how Wilkes ends up becoming the woman that would later batter the legs of her favorite author just to get him to stay with her.

The cast and showrunner of Castle Rock sat down with Culturess during this year’s New York Comic-Con and elaborated on how this version of Wilkes will pay homage to the original story. But most importantly, they teased how the season would be much greater than an origin story for Wilkes.

Castle Rock‘s second season just launched on Hulu with three episodes; new installments will drop weekly going forward. Not only will the season follow what happens before King’s Misery, but it will also shed light on Salem’s Lot and its history. This season will be a tale of two cities, exploring how supernatural and messy family affairs will lead to the future canon versions we already know. We can only imagine that, much like the series’ previous season, the rest of the King references will be Easter eggs dotted across the episodes.

Showrunner Dustin Thomason told Culturess about how he and Sam Shaw decided to explore Misery this season.

"I think there was a part of me that felt connected to Annie and her toxic fandom, if you will. But the question of how she got there and how she arrived at such a crazy place. And what is the humanity that kind of lurks underneath her was something we were always excited to do."

The main story follows one family led by the patriarch Pop Merrill (Tim Robbins) and how a business dispute will eventually get out of control. In any other city, this could be a regular family reunion. But the fact that Castle Rock and Salem’s Lot are both tied to a dark history makes it likely that things will get rather more complicated than family members simply not returning each other’s Facebook messages.

The cast couldn’t divulge much on what exactly the source of the horror will involve this season, but based on the fully fleshed out histories of these iconic references, we can fill in some of the blanks.

The first thing we can bet on is that there will be murder. Wilkes becomes a serial killer in her later years, and she had to start somewhere. The difference here is that Wilkes is a mother. All of her energy is invested in protecting and caring for her daughter, Joy Wilkes (Elsie Fisher). But it doesn’t help that Wilkes is super paranoid and distrusts everyone.

However, we will also learn how Wilkes has gone untreated or misdiagnosed for the mental health conditions that audiences have guessed at for years. In the midst of all of this, it’s just Annie and Joy against the world. And it doesn’t help that the cards are already stacked against Wilkes as she navigates Castle Rock.

Actress Lizzy Caplan, who plays Annie, told us how she made the role her own and, in turn, how her character differs from the version of Wilkes we all know.

"The scripts in the show do a lot of the heavy lifting for me because that Annie is on her own, which just changes a person. This Annie–she has a daughter. She has to interact with the public. She’s moving within the world. She’s working.And just by virtue of that, it will feel different. I don’t remember Annie going through anything in Misery that really terrified her until maybe the very end. There’s plenty of stuff in Castle Rock that really scares her."

Wilkes will also be working in a hospital alongside Dr. Nadia Howlwadaag, played by Yusra Warsama, who is the daughter of Pop Merrill. And so it seems that this employee connection may rope Wilkes into the Merrill family affair.

However,  it doesn’t look like anyone will be branding Wilkes as a killer just yet. ” I think Nadia finds her very intriguing,” Warsama explained. “She’s a bit of a conundrum. She can’t quite work her out.” So at first, Wilkes may be a mystery to many in Castle Rock.

Salem’s Lot is also notorious for its vampire infestation, so clearly, there could be vampires in the future of Castle Rock as well. Warsama confirmed that there are “interesting things that happen” when asked if any vampire victims will end up in the hospital. So we may get to finally see how vampires end up making Salem’s Lot their home or witness the beginning of their earliest attacks on humans. So it seems that between vampires, killers, deaths, Boogey monsters and everything else that Castle Rock has to offer will end up overlapping.

Horror fans and King fans alike have a lot to look forward to as Castle Rock continues, once again inviting us to learn more about how things came to be in King’s world.

Castle Rock is now streaming on Hulu.