I was a big fan of the first season of the show. I watched it when it first came out, well before I had any idea I would be involved in the second season. So I knew the "Castle Rock" model is to take some of the familiar characters and then to put them into completely novel situations. In the first season they took some of the more obscure characters; in our season obviously Annie Wilkes is one of the most iconic characters in both the book "Misery" and of course the film "Misery." So it was daunting, for sure. I wasn't sure how much I wanted to incorporate what I loved about Kathy Bates' performance into my own performance, but if you break up Annie Wilkes' life into three parts, there's her childhood, there's the bulk of what our story is about, and then there's what you see of her in the film. Even though the situations that she finds herself in are very, very different than anything you would imagine in just watching the film, I wanted to have our Annie feasibly be able to become that Annie in the future. So there were different shades of how to attack that, and I thought a lot about how, if I was just a viewer of the show, I wasn't going to be particularly interested in seeing a brand new, completely start-from-scratch version of Annie Wilkes — because what Kathy Bates did was so beloved; it certainly was for me. I wanted to have a few shades to quite a few shades of her performance in my own just so it felt like our Annie Wilkes could grow into hers.
