Sydney Sweeney has poked fun at the infamous Wonka-themed chocolate “experience” in Glasgow last week – see what she had to say below.
Last week, Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow went viral last week on social media after images emerged of an empty warehouse sparsely decorated with a few plastic mushrooms and pictures attached to the walls.
The event advertised “a celebration of sweetness and imagination”, inspired by the hit movie Wonka and the Roald Dahl book that inspired it. Outraged parents began demanding a refund shortly after it opened, describing it as a “farce” run by “cowboys”. The event’s organisers, House of Illuminati, decided to pull the plug just hours into its opening day.
This past weekend, Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live (SNL), during which she partook in several skits, as is the norm with guest hosts. One such skit saw Sweeney take a quick jab at the Willy’s Chocolate Experience.
In the ‘Airbnb Design Commercial’, Sweeney and cast member Chloe Troast portrayed designers for Airbnbs, who claimed to be behind several “bland, generic, downright uninviting” interiors.
“You may know our work from cozy casita steps from LAX,” they said in the skit, which showed a real Airbnb listing of an airplane flying over a house. “And the Wonka Experience in Glasgow,” they continued, with photos taken from the failed Glasgow event.
Following last week’s Glasgow event, an actor who had been hired for the Willy’s Chocolate Experience spoke out about the “dangerous” and “heartbreaking” event. Paul Connell, one of the actors hired to impersonate Willy Wonka in an interview: “The script was 15 pages of AI-generated gibberish of me just monologuing these mad things.”
“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.’”
Connell added: “I was making jokes but we were told to give them one jelly bean and a quarter cup of lemonade,” he continued. “No chocolate at the chocolate experience. There was supposed to be a chocolate fountain somewhere but I never saw it.”