Rebecca Wisocky walks into a haunted house.
This isn’t the set-up for a joke or an episode of Ghosts. This is real.
Before she was Hetty Woodstone on CBS’ supernatural comedy, Wisocky worked at Merchant’s House in Greenwich Village. Today, entering the hallway of her old haunt, Wisocky stops and lets the memories wash over her.
“I cleaned the museum,” says Wisocky, an NYU student at the time. “And I led people on tours, and I was the party planner; me and a bunch of actor friends would work the party. We were animated and knew how to do a cheese board. We’d walk around with little plastic cups of champagne.”
When she first walked up the marble steps from the street, she already wanted to be an actor, so she came to New York. Since graduation, she’s worked steadily on stage and film and is best known for the TV series Devious Maids, Dopesick, and Star Trek: Picard.
Ghosts isn’t her first time as a spirit. In the first season of American Horror Story, Wisocky played the ghost of Lorraine Harvey, and on Big Love, she was the ghost of Emma Smith.
Merchant’s House is an historic attraction in Manhattan, and Wisocky happily returned at the request of Obsessed for this exclusive interview.
The 1832 house with exquisite plasterwork is a reminder of how the 1 percent once lived. A satin dress on exhibit is from the same era as Hetty’s stiff teal frock, for which Wisocky wears a corset to give her the right silhouette. In one of the beds is a dummy of Seabury Treadwell, the deceased owner of the house. Some say they have smelled his cigar smoke; others have reported seeing ghosts here.
Wisocky did not. She notes that without judgment.
Wearing wide-legged jeans, a red plaid coat, and white lace-up high heels, which puts her over 6 feet, Wisocky talks from the secret garden of the East Village landmark. It reinforces her desire to return to New York City. She’s here a lot. Her husband, Lap Chi Chu, is a Tony-nominated lighting designer.
Growing up in York, Penn., “I was really shy, and my mom took me to audition for a children’s community theater,” Wisocky recalls of York Little Theatre (now The Belmont). “And I fell in love with it. I was a runner, so theater was my team sport.”
Always tall, her height typecast her—as older and as a male.
“I was a foot taller than everyone else,” Wisocky says. “I played Santa Claus and George Washington.”
She also wrote a play in third grade and cast herself as Darth Vader.
An only child adopted as a baby, Wisocky instantly knew “how much I loved being around theater people. It seemed like the best fun and the hardest work and a bunch of people having the same problem.”
“I didn’t have a desire to be famous,” she says. “I headed to New York just to find some place in the arts. I was supported by parents who knew how to support a wackadoo arts kid. I’m very, very lucky. I am an adopted kid. The strokes of luck and kismet that came together to raise me—I am a product of that luck.”
Wisocky mentions that she still sees herself as a downtown theater actor. She has also made it uptown with a brief stint as a standby in 1995’s The Play’s The Thing.
“I’d still like to do more film,” Wisocky says. “The job I want most is the one that will have me. There is nothing more thrilling than being in a play that is tight. And when it transcends, there is no better feeling. I don’t care if it’s uptown or downtown.”
As a working actor for decades, she’s played many characters, yet particularly excels at the sort of woman who’s her exact opposite, the kind of imperious diva who can panic an exclusive restaurant’s sommelier by simply raising an eyebrow.
On Devious Maids, she was cold-blooded and hilarious as Evelyn Powell. As Hetty on Ghosts, she’s a snobbish patrician who, like many of the American gentry of the time, has perfectly casual contempt for the Irish. It’s the same archly superior attitude Dame Maggie Smith delighted in as the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, and it’s clear Wisocky easily wears that tiara in her mass of red curls.
Ghosts, a remake of a UK comedy, has been a hit since it premiered on CBS 2021. Making a show during the pandemic and spending half the year in Montreal, the cast grew close. When they’re not shooting, they text and play games online.
“We had to get off online Scrabble,” she says. “It got way too competitive.”
As goofy and fun as the series is, its foundation is historically accurate to upstate New York. Ghosts from different eras haunt the mansion, and the actors have learned about their characters’ times.
“A handful of us went to the Library of Congress, and curators put together each of the ghost’s timelines,” Wisocky says. “The history of Ghosts is the history of New York.”
Working on the comedy allows her to take on other projects.
This season, Wisocky has a recurring role on The Sex Lives of College Girls as Professor Dorfmann, the drama teacher at Essex College. There, she at least has the chance to wear a more fun wardrobe. After all, Hetty is stuck in the dress she died in.
Brutally honest, Dorfmann tells a student: “You have a beautiful voice, but there’s nothing behind it. You lack substance. You’re empty. You’re a reflection of other things you think are good without being good yourself, and that makes you boring.”
She delivers this pleasantly, matter-of-factly. Wisocky’s observations are said with the same acuity and lack of malice. She allows me to snap photos in this garden but she’s far more glamorous than my iPhone 13 can capture, something that’s obvious when I share the dreadful results.
“You definitely did not miss your calling,” she says, then laughs.
We developed a rapport on the Atlanta set of Devious Maids when we discovered we both rescued puppies from The Sato Project. Eight years later, as soon as we got on Zoom, Wisocky asked how my dog was.
It’s lovely to reconnect now, and of course, sitting in a private Manhattan garden is always a treat. Wisocky glances up at surrounding buildings and talks about the possible move back. She walks unbothered through the city and explains how she prefers it.
“I’m actually a pretty shy person,” she says. “I don’t love premieres and all that. I do not relate to being a famous person at all.”
Even starring in top-rated shows and films and being on stage doesn’t diminish the actors’ eternal quest for the next gig.
“The most challenging time as an actor is the hustle,” she says. “When you don’t know if something will land.”
Yet she’s in a terrific place. Returning for the first time to the museum where she worked when she was on the cusp of her career puts it all in perspective.
“I have played older for so long I am finally in the sweet spot, and that feels natural,” Wisocky says. “I am grateful and very proud I have been a working actor and supporting myself as an actor for about 30 years. That, to me, is rich.”
