The face behind popular CBS sitcom Ghosts chats career and what to expect next season.
Let’s take a trip back to 2013. To paint a picture, I was in high school and still had a very religious schedule of TV shows to watch during the week. It was in the middle of the streaming services mega-boom, but shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Once Upon a Time still reigned. And then on June 23, a brand-new series called Devious Maids aired on Lifetime. The comedy drama starred faces like Ana Ortiz, Eva Longoria and Dania Ramirez—as well as one local face: Rebecca Wisocky, who portrayed Evelyn Powell. “I’ve looked like I’m 40 since I was 11, so I got to play lots of roles that I probably had no business playing, but I got to learn a lot and have been fascinated by playing these kinds of difficult, complicated women for my whole life,” Wisocky, who started her acting journey in a community theater in York, explains of her résumé of characters. “I recently described the character as a difficult woman with complicated motives whose controlled appearance contains a storm broiling within, so I think that was certainly an accurate description of Evelyn Powell on Devious Maids as well.” But since the show’s cruel end in 2016 (Lifetime, I’m still patiently waiting on the renewal for Season 5), Wisocky has landed a new hit role in CBS sitcom Ghosts. “I’m so grateful to have found another new show family. We all love each other so much,” she adds. On the new show, which debuts its second season at the end of this month (Sept. 29), Wisocky plays Hetty, who was the wife of a robber baron from the late 1800s. The entire show follows two living characters, Samantha (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar), who decide to renovate an old, inherited country estate into a bed-and-breakfast. To their surprise, there are still multiple spirits who were previous residents of the home and land still wandering the premises. “We’re all trapped there for some reason, and I think we’re slowly starting to get a clue that our relationship to one another is part of that reason,” she says of what to expect in the next season. “It’s one of the things that’s been so lovely about the show… to see all of these different characters from different walks of life and time periods that would have never interacted in their own time, being forced to confront the discomfort that comes from these new points of view.” As for Hetty, Wisocky hints that the tightly wound ghost might be loosening her corset this season. She teases, “When you take someone who’s so tightly wound up, they start to unravel a little bit. Hilarity can’t help but ensue.”
Photography by: THE RIKER BROS
