One of the keys to this seems to be Annie's motherhood, which at first glance may seem to be a very differerent dynamic than the sadistic love she has for Paul Sheldon. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about her character, Caplan explained why Annie's love for Joy and Annie's love for Paul Sheldon are actually part of the same unifying drive within her.
And it's an all-consuming, obsessive love. Ultimately, the final stop is her love for Paul Sheldon. This is who Annie is. She knows how to love one thing with everything she's got at the expense of all other things," Caplan said.
It's not some, 'I'm a creepy monster weirdo. Annie was a maternity nurse who began killing the babies in her care, until eventually she was tried in court for their deaths. She was never convicted due to a lack of evidence, but keeps a photo album with newspaper clippings dating back to her very first crime: murdering her father at the age of 11 by pushing him down the stairs.
She also murdered her college roommate, as well as other patients in her care, and ultimately plans to kill Paul as well in a murder-suicide.
Annie has a litany of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder that causes her to suffer depressive episodes - especially when it rains. The Annie Wilkes in Misery alternates between acting like a sweet middle-aged lady and having episodes of extreme rage triggered by everything from being cut off in traffic to Paul asking her to get a different kind of typewriter paper.
Though she is obsessed with romance novels and falls in love with Paul, she doesn't appear to have any interest in sex and is disgusted by any kind of profanity, instead using words like "cockadoodie" to express her anger.
She dresses very conservatively in heavy layers, always wears a cross around her neck, and loves little trinkets and Liberace records. So, how does Caplan's take on the character compare? Annie Wilkes being the protagonist of Castle Rock positions her as a much more sympathetic character, though her dark past is teased from the very start of the series, when we see a bloodstained young Annie fleeing from something terrible she has done.
However, unlike Bates' version of the character, Caplan's Annie is desperate to try and maintain her mental health, and has figured out a "recipe" of anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety drugs that keep her stable. She acquires this drugs by working in temporary nursing jobs at different hospitals around the country, raiding their pharmacies, and then fleeing before anyone finds out what she has done. The reason Annie is so desperate to stay sane is her daughter, Joy.
As should be obvious right away, Joy's name is the opposite of Misery, and Annie cares for her more than anything else in the world, desperate to keep her safe and protected - even if it means lying to her. It's implied from the very start that Joy may not actually be Annie's daughter; in a flashback, we see that young Annie ran away with baby Joy during the incident that left her covered in blood, and Annie also suffers hallucinations of a bloodied dead man.
On a superficial level, Caplan's Annie Wilkes has a lot in common with Bates' version: she wears lots of layers, including shirts under her nursing scrubs, and wears the same cross around her neck. She has a profound mistrust of men, and refers to Ace Merrill as a "dirty birdy" one of her favorite phrases from the book and film.
She also hates foul language, instead sticking to words like "oogy" and "cockadoodie," and saying "Christmas! When I look at something now, I want it to be fun and I want to have a nice experience because, at my age, what are you going to do? Sit home and watch your old movies? If you make good memories with your work, that's what you take with you. It's not necessarily what you did, even though you're proud of that too. It's the actual doing of it that's important. If it's not fun, then you don't want to do it anymore.
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