‘Ghosts’ Star Rebecca Wisocky Teases How Hetty ‘Comes Undone’ in Season 2

TV’s most popular comedy Ghosts is currently filming its sophomore run in Montréal with a premiere date set for September but when it returns after its record-breaking debut season averaging 8.4 million viewers, audiences will see another side of Henrietta “Hetty” Woodstone played most marvelously by Rebecca Wisocky. During the show’s first San Diego Comic-Con panel last week hosted by Ghosts guest star Matt Walsh, series castmate Utkarsh Ambudkar admitted that he couldn’t wait for fans to see Hetty’s “unnerving” character shift. 

Wisocky interjected during the conversation, sharing how the Woodstone matriarch “comes undone a bit.” While she remained mum on the exact details, she praised her showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman for being so “wonderful” in allowing the characters to “maintain [their] hypocrisy.”

“There’s something so great about these characters allowing [them] to experience things that the rest of the world has come to accept as normal. But we can experience them in this very kind of childlike, sometimes very idiotic manner, which is very funny and they let us take several steps forward in an evolution towards feminism or what have you,” Wisocky said at the panel in front of convention-goers and media in the famed Ballroom 20 on July 21. “But, but they always allow for us to betray ourselves and take three steps back at the same time. That keeps it fresh and it, and it keeps it’s funny — it’s funny to watch people try so desperately to learn a lesson and learn a little bit, but really run back to their whole and so, it’s kept a lot of avenues open and it’s been very fun to play for Hetty in particular.”

Though we have just scratched the surface on Hetty and what exactly her special powers could be, Wiseman later confirmed during the panel that each ghost at the mansion does have a special power, which they will “continue to explore” all season long. In an interview with PopCulture.com this past summer, Wisocky admits without presumption how she wants to see a deeper dive into her Gilded Age spirit, postulating how there is a possible “change” transpiring in the Woodstone figure. “Everything that [the writers have] given me has been so wonderful and surprising and exciting and at the very beginning, I would say to the Joes [Port and Wiseman], ‘Well, yeah, but you haven’t said how she dies yet. How am I going to talk about this character? People are going to want to know.’ And they’re like, ‘No, no, this could go on for years and years and years,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, okay.’ ‘Yeah, the more doors you kind of wait to open, the more, different pathways you then leave open down the line.’”

Adding how she hopes that we learn just how Hetty died, Wisocky further reveals to PopCulture that she would love to learn what her power is seeing as a majority of the house ghosts all have some kind of ability. “[Even] if she has a power or if she’s profoundly powerless, that would be just as juicy to play,” she said. “Anything they hand me, I’m going to take it and try to run. So I think we might figure out a little bit more about her backstory.”

Stating how her character has the “farthest to go” in terms of character development, Wisocky praises the female characters on the show for being “pioneers” in their time, a commendable aspect of the 22-minute comedy even though Hetty was not. “[She was] representative of the social mores and the class structure of her time and was kind of a snoot and possibly a very horrible person, she and her husband and she was oppressed in her marriage and didn’t really try to break out of it or didn’t feel like she had the capacity to, and I’m interested in those first 20, 30, 40 years after had Hetty died. How much more of a stick in the mud was she? What were her first interactions with Alberta [Danielle Pinnock] like?” she said. “It took her a hundred years to come around to the idea that women might be okay for women to vote, so, she’s got a lot farther to go.”

For more on Ghosts, stay tuned to the very latest about the show, news about the cast, and everything in between only on PopCulture. In the meantime, relive the first season of Ghosts on Paramount+ for free from June 3 to Sept. 2, 2022.