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Get ready to be shocked by The Haunting of Bly Manor on every level. The second season of Mike Flanagan’s anthology series features a surprise cameo from just about the last person you would expect: The Room star Greg Sestero.
If you’ve never seen The Room, truly you are missing out on one of the good parts in life. The 2003 independent movie was written, produced, and directed by Tommy Wiseau who also starred in it. It follows a man who finds out his fiancé is cheating on him, but the plot truly doesn’t matter. What matters is that The Room has gone down as one of the most delightfully terrible movies of all time. Its awful reputation has turned it into a cult icon and even spawned a Golden Globe-winning good film, 2017’s The Disaster Artist. In the years since its premiere both Wiseau and Sestero have become pseudo-celebrities in their own right, touring the country to attend screenings and collaborating on another movie.
Basically The Room and its unrelenting awful acting and directorial choices have absolutely nothing to do with horror. Maybe you could argue that it gave film critics nightmares, but that’s about it. And yet here Greg Sestero is acting like he isn’t part of every movie buff’s favorite train-wreck:
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The Haunting of Bly Manor starts with an unnamed woman (rudely) interrupting a bride and groom’s rehearsal dinner to tell a ghost story. That ghost story acts as the main narrative of this season. But tucked away in the present day is Greg Sestero as the listening groom. There are no references to his storied past, no explanations about why this particular actor was chosen for this particular role. There’s just Mark.
But it gets even weirder. Warning: Major spoiler ahead. Since it’s later revealed that the bride is Flora, that means Flora married Mark. That small detail is more bizarre than anything else happening in Bly Manor.
It’s oddly fitting. When The Turn of the Screw was first published using a storyteller as a narrative framing device was common. Now the setup feels unapologetically clunky. Whether its intentional or not, the star of one of the clunkiest movies of all time is standing in the background of this jarring setup. As wrong as this is it feels so right.
