Misery character Annie Wilkes (played by Lizzy Caplan) is the new main character in season 2 of Castle Rock.
Hulu
If you love Stephen King‘s creepy tales, then Castle Rock is the town full of scary characters and terrifying moments. The new season of the Hulu anthology series focuses on a younger version of Stephen King’s Misery character Annie Wilkes played by Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex).
“In Season 2, a feud between warring clans comes to a boil when budding psychopath Annie Wilkes, Stephen King’s nurse from hell, gets waylaid in Castle Rock,” according to the official series synopsis.
In the new trailer posted on Monday, Wilkes is shown in Castle Rock as a young mom and hospital nurse who also happens to have a very violent side and seems to be battling a few inner demons herself. The trailer portrays the paranoid and dark side to Wilkes who was originally played by Kathy Bates in the 1990 horror film Misery.
Because Castle Rock is an anthology horror series, fans get a whole new set of characters that weren’t in Season 1.
Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade) plays the character Joy — Wilkes’ home-schooled teenage daughter. Robin Weigert (Big Little Lies) is Crysilda Wilkes — Annie Wilkes’s mother.
Tim Robbins (The Shawshank Redemption) plays the character Reginald “Pop” Merrill, the head of a crime family. Pop is dying of cancer and is trying to keep his family together. The character Pop first appeared in King’s 1990 novella “The Sun Dog.”
Paul Sparks (House of Cards) is the character John “Ace” Merrill — Pop’s nephew — who plans on taking over the crime family as its leader. This character was appeared in the 1986 film Stand by Me and was played by actor Kiefer Sutherland.
Greg Grunberg (A Star Is Born) plays Sheriff Boucher; Sarah Gadon (True Detective) is Rita Green, described as “a vengeful woman from Annie’s past.” Alison Wright (Sneaky Pete) plays the character Valerie, who is described as a kind-hearted local who is exploring the town’s evil history.”
Yusra Warsam (Assassin’s Creed: Origins) is Dr. Nadia Omar — a Somalian medical director trained from Harvard but works in the rural hospital in Castle Rock’s neighboring town of Jerusalem’s Lot. Barkhad Abdi (Blade Runner 2049) plays Dr. Nadia Omar’s tough older brother Abdi Omar.
John Hoogenakker (Jack Ryan) is playing the character nicknamed Tall Man who has “a complicated connection to Annie Wilkes.”
“The basic idea is that it is an anthology in the sense that we’re going to tell a new story that gives you a different lens into Castle Rock and into Stephen King each season,” Castle Rock showrunner Dustin Thomason explained last year. “The thing we’ve always been really excited about, in the same way that the Stephen King universe operates, is that each story will stand alone, but that we will be circling back to characters whose stories intersect with the new stories.”
Castle Rock Season 2 premieres on Hulu on Oct. 23.