An actor playing one of the doomed Willy Wonkas has opened up about dealing with police, crying children and rioting parents at the immersive theatre event of the century - Willy’s Chocolate Experience - a place he says “where dreams go to die”.
Lured in by the promise of £500, Michael Archibald, 18, turned up to his first ever acting gig expecting a professional role in a theatre type-play but even the traumatic experience couldn’t shatter his dreams of treading the boards on the West End as the cheeky chocolatier.
He gave The Independent a virtual backstage tour of the tragic event with open-plan changing rooms, paltry jelly bean dispensary and tragic AI poster of a gingerbread house barely covering a third of the wall.
One parent complained of arriving to find a “disorganised mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lacklustre candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears”.
But days after going viral Mr Archibald and the other staff, some who spent three days setting up the so-called “chocolate factory”, say they are still waiting for their first paycheck from organiser House of Illuminati’s Billy Coull.
He told The Independent: “Everything was described as a world of wonders and imagination, an immersive experience.
“But once I walked in to see that everything had still been getting set up, I felt like things were going to take a turn for the worst from then on.
“There was a lot of dancing about with our contracts and mentions of pay felt flimsy.
“I was asking the staff members about how long they had been working there with most telling me they had just barely been hired on the day and were being worked to the bone. They had worked 12-hour shifts for three days straight with no breaks and equally no pay from Billy Coull.
“I didn’t have time to memorise the scripts for context, as the actors and I had only been given our scripts at 6pm on Friday.”
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He added: “By Saturday I was in absolute tatters.
Arriving at 10am, he found queues of frustrated families waiting 40 minutes over their allotted time slots.
He said: “We were essentially told to scrap our scripts which wasn’t a complete loss as it all had been AI generated.
“But it was an incredibly huge waste of time.
“I scrapped my role as a Wonka after doing a full run-through in the morning and decided to go around asking some of the parents questions on what was going on, where they had come from places like Inverness and Dundee?
“My overriding feeling to it all was this is where dreams went to die.”
By lunchtime angry parents trying to get in called the police, who arrived and quizzed the teenager.
He added: “I gave as much info to them as I could. The police took note of what I was saying and said it was good information.
“The man I spoke to took down all of the things I was talking about and said to see whether we’d get paid or not. We clearly haven’t!”
He added: “It was almost comical how everyone started rioting, throwing things about and really kicking up a fuss.
“One thing to take away from this event is you don’t mess with the Scots.”
Willy’s Chocolate Experience organiser Billy Coull apologised for his “vision of the artistic rendition of a well-known book that didn’t come to fruition” and offered 850 people their money back before closing the Glasgow experience on Saturday.
Mr Archibald hit back: “I think regardless of what they’ve been saying, this was quite the planned-out con.
“It’s really interesting to see how they’ve utilised AI so much for script writing and their website and feels like an insult to artists and creative alike, especially considering their budget. It wouldn’t have been that hard to hire some real artists.”
On his future as an actor: “What’s next? Who knows! Hopefully not another Wonkagate though. I hope it doesn’t put other actors off of this for the future, instead it should show that regardless of how terrible the event was, we had some really incredible people trying their best to bring smiles onto the young people’s faces.
“I’d love to work a lot more in the entertainment industry, if I was able to influence people and inspire others then that’s where I’d want to be.
“I’d adore to be an actor however I’m not sure how that would end up considering this was supposed to be my first gig. But I’m not worried regardless, since things normally work out well when you’ve got your heart in it.”
Asked if he planned to reunite the actors and bring the chaotic immersive theatre event of the century so far to the West End, he replied: “Now that would be far too good. The people of London would go wild for it.”
