Annie Wilkes

**Anne Marie Wilkes**, portrayed by Lizzy Caplan, is the main character in season 2 of *Castle Rock*. She is a nurse on the run with her sister-raised-as-daughter Joy, in search of "the laughing place," who gets waylaid in Castle Rock. She struggles with psychosis, which she keeps in check with stolen anti-psychotic drugs.

## History

### Background

Annie was born in Bakersfield, California to Carl and Crysilda Wilkes (née Berryman), an aspiring writer and a nurse respectively. Both of them were conservative in their views, being guarded about and generally opposed to what they called "government propaganda".

Annie had a history of violent outbursts during her time at a public school, where she had been bullied due to her difficulties advancing on account of a learning disability. When she violently beat a classmate with her lunch box during a bus ride, Annie was expelled, resulting in her spending most of her youth being home-schooled, since her parents denied that anything was wrong with Annie and refused to send her to either special education classes or get her on prescription for her anger issues. Annie remained only semi-literate well into her teens, due to which her family eventually hired a private tutor named Rita Green. Having few social contacts, she was very close to her parents, regularly assisting her father in his pursuits as a novelist. He was the one who told Annie about "The Laughing Place", a core idea for his book, The Ravening Angel, which he promised to dedicate to his "number one fan".

Annie's already troubled life came crashing down on her when her mother attempted to commit vehicular murder-suicide with her daughter, barely escaping a watery grave, before discovering through the special thanks in her father's published book that he had been cheating on his wife with Annie's tutor. While confronnting him about this, in a fit of rage, Annie pushed her father down a stairwell, accidentally killing him. With no one else to blame but herself, she then attempts to murder Rita for her role in her family's break-down, then kidnapped her infant daughter Evangeline, whom she had conceived with Annie's father. Although biologically her half-sister, Annie came to view Evangeline as her daughter, raising her as such under the name Joy Wilkes, without disclosing their actual relationship, soon becoming the center point of her life. Annie would only refer to Joy's father as a bad man, and tells her that he was the reason she has spent her life on the run.

She spent her adult life on the run with Joy in search of "The Laughing Place," where the two of them could settle and make a life. She took temporary nursing jobs, raided the clinic's pharmaceutical storage for antipsychotics before leaving for a new place with a new license plate.

### Castle Rock (2019)

Annie got into a car accident in *Castle Rock* and stayed at the Star Gazer Lodge while waiting for her windshield to be repaired. After a week without pills, she was anxious and irritable, and her hallucinations worsened; in particular, she had disturbing visions of a tall man with a disfigured and bloodied face. She took a job at Deuxville Hospital under the fake name of Anne Ingalls and was caught by Dr. Nadia stealing pills. Instead of reporting her, the doctor wrote her a prescription for the pills she needed. Annie considered that she and Joy might actually settle in *Castle Rock*.

The idyll was short lived, as she was confronted by Ace Merrill, the landlord, who knew Annie's real identity after spying on her internet activity. He threatened Joy, who had witnessed him making molotov cocktails, so a frightened Annie killed him by jamming an ice cream scoop down his throat. While dumping the body at a construction site for a new mall in Jerusalem's Lot, she fell into a cavern which appeared to be a tomb, with coffins and skeletons. Finding an alternative way, she made her way out through the Marsten House.

Ace's uncle Pop interrogated Annie about his disappearance, because Ace's dog barked at her cabin door. Annie admitted to the beginning of the encounter she had with Ace, but continued with a lie about Ace fleeing into the woods from a black man with a gun. Annie saw Ace, alive and well, staring at her outside her car. Doubting her own memories, she explored the now concrete-filled construction site and the Marsten House, where she was met by a man covered in slime, eating a raw egg, who shouted at her.

Annie believed the events to be hallucinations and revealed her experience to Joy. Thinking her mother was having a psychotic episode, Joy sedated and restrained her to her bed, as per their pre-arranged plan. Joy forced Annie to take her pills, which she spat out, and demanded the truth about "everything." Annie told her that they were on the run because her father was a bad man who was coming to get them. She managed to free herself by dislocating her shoulder and cutting the ropes with broken glass, which she accidentally also cut Joy with, causing her daughter to run off. The tall man appeared to Annie again, telling her she knew “how this story ends,” with Annie killing “her.”

## Personality

Annie has an awkward and slightly goofy presentation, with a "penguin walk" and a childish vocabulary; using words and phrases like "fudge," "dirty bird" and "Christmas" instead of vulgarities.

Beyond the charming surface she is deeply disturbed. She appears to have a deep distrust of other people and a life on the run has allowed her to not get involved with anyone but her daughter. She sees Joy as the light of her life and is severely overprotective of her.

Mentally, she seems fringed and anxious and easily goes into hysterics. She struggles with psychotic episodes, and possibly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder her or (schizoaffective) that she treats with a mixture of the anti-psychotic drugs Risperdal, Haldol, and Lithium. She is a pathological liar.

## King Connections

The character is the main character of King's 1987 novel *Misery*. In the 1990 film adaptation, the character was portrayed by Kathy Bates, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal.

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Let the River Run" *Castle Rock* Season 2 Episode 1.