Why You Never See Charlie From Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory Anymore
Though there have been several remakes of Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory over the years, the 1971 film—according to fan and critic ratings—stands out among the other Wonka takes as an enduring classic. Yet despite the film’s success, the child actor Peter Ostrum never worked in Hollywood again. And the reason he gave up stardom might surprise you.
Peter Ostrum
Played by child-actor Peter Ostrum, Charlie Bucket is the central character in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. It’s a fantastical tale that follows the young boy on a journey to a remarkable location. But despite the film’s success, child-actor Peter Ostrum never worked in Hollywood again. And the reason he gave up stardom might surprise you.
The movie is based on Roald Dahl’s splendid children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As well as Ostrum, the movie version also featured other child actors in roles including Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee, and Veruca Salt. That was the lucky — but largely undeserving — group of kids invited to explore the weird and wonderful world of Willy Wonka.
Gene Wilder
Indeed, the movie’s most interesting character, Wonka, was played by a comedy legend, the late Gene Wilder. In fact, Wilder’s portrayal of the factory owner earned him a Best Actor nomination at the Golden Globes.
Amazingly, the actor was able to depict Wonka as someone to be liked and feared in equal measure. Describing Wilder’s performance in 2021 The Guardian’s Guy Lodge extolled the actor’s “droll, eerily underplayed interpretation of Wonka, a sinister-sweet antihero who has haunted as many dreams as he has launched memes.”
Hard times
Wilder’s Wonka definitely stole the movie. But the story is really about Charlie Bucket and his family who have fallen on hard times. The Buckets are so poor that young Charlie has to work as a newspaper delivery boy every morning to bolster the household finances.
Generations of Buckets, including his bedridden grandparents, are forced to live crammed together in one house. So no wonder Wonka’s offer of a lifetime supply of chocolate appeals to the young man, for whom candy of any kind is a rare luxury.
Golden tickets
And after Wonka announces that five lucky winners will also have a tour of his factory, chaos ensues. With just a handful of winning golden tickets up for grabs, randomly hidden in Wonka bars, the candy becomes ridiculously popular.
As you might guess, Charlie is of course determined to find a winning bar. But his family — all confined to their beds except Charlie and his parents — have little money to spare. Obviously, winning one of the golden tickets is impossible without a Wonka bar purchase.
Two Wonka chocolate bars
Despite their grinding poverty the Buckets club together, and find the cash to buy Charlie two Wonka chocolate bars. He opens them with great anticipation but sadly, if perhaps predictably, neither contains a winning ticket. The disappointment is crushing.
But in the meantime, four of the five golden tickets are found elsewhere by lucky children. They are German Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt from the U.K., Arizona’s Mike Teavee and Montana’s Violet Beauregarde. Yet that doesn’t mean Charlie’s all out of luck.
Elation
A stroke of good fortune sees Charlie find some money on the street not long after the four tickets had been discovered. There was still one out there, and when Charlie buys another Wonka bar, inside he finds the fifth and final golden ticket.
Elated, he asks his grandpa Joe to accompany him as chaperone to the Wonka factory for the tour. Unexpectedly, the disabled veteran rises from his bed for the first time in 20 years, overjoyed at the prospect. But as well-behaved as Charlie is on their visit to the factory, it appears that the other winners have little in common with him.
Bad behavior
During the Buckets’ day out it becomes clear that their fellow winners of the Wonka factory tour treat have less-than-perfect manners: their behavior leaves a lot to be desired. One by one, the young candy fans are picked off as they recklessly ignore health and safety warnings.
In fact, it’s their own greed that leads to their gruesome downfalls inside the factory. But the misfortunes that now befall the other four golden-ticket-holders actually provide some of the biggest laughs in the movie.
A giant blueberry
In one scene television obsessive Mike Teavee marvels at a gadget Wonka has invented called “Wonkavision.” It shrinks Wonka bars to a tiny size and teleports them via a TV signal; Teavee tries the gadget on himself and ends up as a severely miniaturized boy.
Greedy Augustus Gloop falls into a river of chocolate and is sucked up into a large pipe which violently ejects him. Violet Beauregarde is turned into a giant blueberry: alarmingly, having sampled some forbidden chewing gum, she has to be squeezed or she’ll explode. Veruca, meanwhile, is ejected via a trash chute.
Fizzy Lifting Drink
Even Charlie and Grandpa Joe have their own near-death experience at the factory when they help themselves to some of Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink. Disconcertingly the bubbles in this beverage cause Charlie and his granddad to float up into the air.
At first this is great fun, but the experience becomes distinctly hair-raising as they ascend towards a rotating fan that threatens to cut them to pieces. Fortunately Granddad Joe hits upon the only way to escape their fate. They need to belch: once they do, they sink safely back to the ground. Eventually, only the Buckets make it to the end of the tour unscathed.
The winner
During the film’s closing scenes, we discover that Wonka actually had an ulterior motive for inviting those children to his factory. It turns out that he was searching for an heir, someone to whom he could leave his beloved factory, and he had been testing the children.
But all of the children, including Charlie, failed the test by consuming forbidden candy during the tour. Yet there was one last test for Charlie alone, which he passes with flying colors. His reward is to take ownership of the Wonka factory and so to rescue his family from poverty.
Overnight child star
As you’d expect, appearing in this movie turned the young Peter Ostrum into an overnight child star. But this 12-year-old who’d been lucky enough to win the plum role of Charlie Bucket didn’t go on to become a seasoned movie actor, as many in Hollywood thought he would.
Although he was offered a three-movie deal by Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory producer David L. Wolper, Ostrum chose to turn the opportunity down. Although he did try for some parts, he didn’t get any of them. And then his life took a completely different turn.
An interest in acting
Before we get into what happened to Ostrum after Willie Wonka & The Chocolate Factory let’s find out a little bit more about him. Peter Gardner Ostrum was born in Dallas, Texas, in November 1957. He was the youngest of four children born to parents Dean and Sarepta.
It seems that he had an interest in acting from a young age and when his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, while he was still a youngster he found an outlet for his talent. That was at the Cleveland Play House children’s theater.
We’ll call you…
In fact it was while he was acting there that a talent scout spotted him and invited him to audition for the part of Charlie Bucket. As Ostrum in 2000 told the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association [AVMA], “It was in the pre-video era, so they took a few Polaroid pictures and tape-recorded me reading from the [Roald Dahl] book.”
As the audition ended, he recalled the agents saying, “Don’t call us. We’ll call you if we’re interested.” Then they jetted off back to New York. And, for about two months, it seemed that they very much weren’t interested.
On set playing Charlie Bucket
That all changed, though, with a phone call. Ostrum was summoned to New York for another audition. After this second trial the 12-year-old waited another four weeks to find out if he’d got the part. Eventually, a second call came.
Of course, Ostrum got the role, and then his film career took off at a bewildering speed. A mere ten days later he was on set playing Charlie Bucket. You might assume that Ostrum would have been whisked off to Hollywood, or perhaps the U.K. But that’s not what happened.
Munich
Perhaps surprisingly, filming for Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory took place in the German city of Munich, starting in August 1970. Interestingly, the city was already preparing for a massive upcoming event at the time that would put it at the center of world interest.
The Olympic Games were due to take place in Munich in 1972; this was something that fascinated the young Ostrum. He told the Journal of the AVMA, “They were building the Olympic city at the time, and that was exciting”.
Better than a paper round
It seems that this experience of filming and being in a foreign country was one that Ostrum very much enjoyed. He told the veterinary journal that, “It was sort of like being an exchange student for five months.”
This was surely a 12-year-old’s dream come true. Getting to live abroad, work on a magical set, and get paid isn’t bad at all for a kid’s first movie job. It certainly beats the paper round that his character Charlie Bucket was compelled to do every day to keep his family afloat.
A family
What’s more, making the movie was clearly a bonding moment for Ostrum and his co-stars. He fondly recalls the whole experience of working with adult actors as well as the other children in the cast, and he has even described them as a family.
But he holds a special place in his heart for Gene Wilder, who portrayed the colorful candy man, Willy Wonka. It’s Wilder’s performance, of course, that’s widely seen as being at the very heart of the movie’s appeal.
Fond memories
The star of comedy classics such as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, Wilder was already an established and successful actor at the time. But Ostrum was making his movie debut and so looked up to the comedy legend. He had fond memories of him for years afterwards.
As he later told Variety magazine after Wilder’s 2016 death, “He was the pro and I was a rookie”. And he added that that his co-star had been “a gentle man, but he was also a gentleman.”
A candy-themed bond
As Ostrum continued to explain, “[Wilder] was so quirky. You never knew what to expect from him.” But even so “he treated people with respect and dignity.” Despite the actor’s unpredictable nature on-set, when they were away from the cameras the pair shared a candy-themed bond.
“[The crew] would break for lunch,” Ostrum told Variety magazine, “and Gene and I would always buy a chocolate bar and share it on the way back to set.” All very appropriate, given the movie they were working on together.
A one-off
When Wilder died, Ostrum was understandably upset. “It’s kind of like losing a parent,” he revealed to Variety following news of his co-star’s demise. Wilder’s health had been poor for some time, so his death was not entirely unexpected.
But as Ostrum put it, “You know it’s going to happen, but it’s still a shock… It hits you like, ‘Gene is gone and there will never be anyone like him again.’” Many movie fans would be in complete agreement with that sentiment: Wilder was a one-off.
A difficult profession
Once filming on Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory had wrapped up, Ostrum went back to his everyday life. Despite that three-picture deal we mentioned earlier, he chose to return to school. And it seems that, while he mostly enjoyed making the movie, he found that the business simply didn’t suit him.
As he told the Journal of the AVMA, “Everybody thinks that acting is such a glamorous profession, but it is a difficult profession.” What’s more, Ostrum was beginning to have a different idea about what he wanted to do with his life.
A horse
A key turning point came along in Ostrum’s life not long after he'd finished filming Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory and was back at home with his family. The Ostrums had bought a horse which they stabled at an establishment nearby.
The young Ostrum started to visit the stables and after a time actually took a job there. And there was a character at the stables who made a massive impression on the youngster. “I can remember the vet coming out and taking care of the horses,” he told the veterinary journal.
A huge impression
Ostrum recalled watching the vet working with the horses. “It made a huge impression on me. This person really enjoyed what he did for a living. My father was a lawyer”, Ostrum continued.
“I really didn’t have a clue what he did all day. But I knew exactly what the veterinarian did. Someone making a living from something he enjoyed so much really sparked my interest.” Ostrum was beginning to see a possible future that didn’t involve any kind of acting.
A return to the movies?
After he’d graduated from high school, Ostrum decided to take a year off before enrolling for college. At first he spent this time off from studying to work as a groom at various stables. Then he actually took a job at Pennsylvania’s Delaware Equine Center.
But Ostrum hadn’t entirely forgotten Hollywood. For during his year off he did consider the possibility of relaunching his acting career. “I spoke to some of the people involved with Willy Wonka,” he told the Journal of the AVMA.
Vet school or bust
“At that point it appeared difficult for me to get into veterinary school. I thought maybe I should pursue acting, and went to discuss it with them”, Ostrum recalled. So it seems that Ostrum was regarding acting as something that he might return to if he couldn’t get into veterinary school.
Ostrum went so far as to pay a visit to California to see how the land lay as far as a return to movies was concerned. But after a week he returned home, even more set than before on a future as a vet.
Not his dream
Despite those seven days scouting the possibilities of the Hollywood movie scene, ultimately Ostrum knew that he’d found his calling. And it didn’t involve moving to California to pursue the dream of becoming a movie star: that just wasn’t his dream.
As far as he was concerned, if he went back to Hollywood,“[I] would always have in the back of my mind, ‘You should have tried to get into veterinary school’,” he told the Journal of the AVMA. He added, “If I didn’t pursue that, I’d always kick myself.”
Graduating as a vet
So Ostrum persevered, and eventually got into the prestigious Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. Subsequently, he graduated in 1984 and never looked back. He went on to have a successful and fulfilling career as a veterinary practitioner.
Despite his previous success, the former child actor never again appeared in a movie. In fact, he shied away from publicity, refusing to do interviews about his past acting. Yet there was one occasion when his determination to shun acting briefly wavered.
Lightning striking twice
A 2023 article in the British tabloid The Sun revealed how at one point Ostrum had again considered returning to acting. Ostrum had told the HollywoodChicago website, “The only time I ever considered [acting] again was when I heard they were holding auditions to replace Peter Firth in Equus on Broadway,”
"Getting the part would have been like lightning striking twice, but I didn’t get it” Ostrum continued. "So, I continued in school with the same majors: animal husbandry and veterinary medicine.”
Breaking with the past
In fact Ostrum’s break with his past as an actor on Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory became something of an obsession for him. He even went so far as to lie about it, claiming that not he but his brother had appeared as Charlie Bucket in the movie.
But he finally broke his silence in 2000 when he spoke to the Journal of the AVMA. What’s more, he even appeared on the Today show in 2005 alongside the other, now-grown, Wonka kids. And he revealed he had no regrets about the path he had since chosen away from Hollywood.
Rosy-cheeked
In his interview on Today Ostrum said, “[If only] everybody could be so lucky to have an experience like this [the Wonka film], and then [be able to] go in a different direction.” In 2005 Ostrum also did an interview about his acting past that was broadcast on NPR.
Interviewer Jesse Baker remarked, “Peter Ostrum remains small in frame. His cheeks are rosy and his blue eyes look like they could still well up the way Charlie Bucket’s did in the scene where he told his mother all hope was lost and he wasn’t ever going to find a golden ticket.”
Hiding his Hollywood past
Baker and Ostrum actually went to see the Tim Burton remake of Willy Wonka together. She asked his opinion of the new movie. Ostrum replied, "Julie Dawn Cole, who played Veruca in the original film, had a wonderful analogy that I’ll use. It’s sort of like going back to a house that you once lived in that’s been redecorated.”
The reporter also noted Ostrum’s extraordinary reticence about his Hollywood past. She wrote that, “His wife Loretta says it took him years to tell anyone in their small town about Willy Wonka. And he only mentioned it to her when she was about to meet his mother.”
“Do it again!”
Alongside the friendships he made, Ostrum has just one other memento from his time on the Willy Wonka set. But it’s not one of the crazy creations that appeared on screen, like an Everlasting Gobstopper or a golden ticket.
No, it’s a movie clapperboard, used by the director to officially start takes. As Ostrum went on to explain to the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), “Mel would say ‘Action!’ And then he would usually say ‘Cut! Ostrum, do it again!’” Obviously it wasn’t all plain sailing as a child actor!
Pure imagination
Still, Ostrum’s involvement with Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory didn’t end there. In 2000 he and the other Wonka kids got together for the film’s 30th anniversary. And they marked the occasion by recording their own commentary for a special DVD release.
The DVD included a special feature titled Pure Imagination: The Story of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. It was directed by Mel Stuart, the man who had made the 1971 film, and included interviews with Gene Wilder, the child actors, and other members of the cast.
New fans
But it wasn’t just the anniversary that was special. In fact, recording the audio commentary would prove a momentous moment for the cast. “We never really sat down [all of us] kids and watched the film together,” Ostrum told the Journal of the AVMA.
“When you watch the DVD you’ll be able to hear our reactions and commentary throughout,” Ostrum added. And as the years have passed, the movie has gained new fans following subsequent re-releases. Obviously the 2005 remake and the 2023 release of Wonka have also boosted the original movie.
Top hats and canes
Interestingly Burton’s 2005 remake substituted Johnny Depp for Gene Wilder in the role of Willy Wonka. In the 2023 version, which is an origin story, Wonka is played by Timothée Chalamet. Writing in The Boston Globe in 2023 Odie Henderson noted that the three versions of Wonka “have a few things in common.”
“Their fashion sense includes top hats and canes, they obsess over making chocolate, they smile a lot, and they operate on various levels of eccentricity”, Odie points out. But their attitudes to the children are very different. Wilder is “is noncommittal” and Depp “hates children”, while Chalamet “has a childlike wonder.”
Top 50 Cult Movies
For Ostrum, the original movie took on an even more special significance once he became a father. In 2014 he told the OWN network, “I really didn’t appreciate the significance of the film until I had children of my own. They saw the film… And I realized that my story is a little bit unique.”
And it’s not just Ostrum’s children’s generation that have subsequently fallen in love with the movie. For Entertainment Weekly magazine added Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to its Top 50 Cult Movies list in 2003.
“We captured lightning in a bottle”
Then in 2014 Congress recognized the movie’s cultural importance when the film was chosen for inclusion on the National Film Registry. As far as Ostrum is concerned, playing Charlie has become a memory that the former actor now cherishes.
“We captured lightning in a bottle. For whatever reason, the film worked,” he told the OWN network in 2014. But even now he can’t quite believe how popular he still is. “Am I famous? In my eyes, absolutely not. And I’m amused that [anybody’s] here to talk to me!”
Growing stature
So, despite Ostrum having turned his back on Hollywood all those years ago, movie fans never forgot him or that original version of Willy Wonka. Although it wasn’t a massive hit when released, its stature has grown over the years.
From conventions to reunions, lovers of the film have had plenty of recent opportunities to meet the real-life Charlie Bucket. But you’ve just as much chance coming across him on your farm. Interestingly, though, Ostrum’s on-screen career hasn’t completely ended. There’s one last series of appearances featuring Peter Ostrum, vet.
True purpose
You’ve heard right, because he actually took part in a YouTube series all about his profession. Entitled Veterinarians on Call, the show follows the animal carer as he goes about his business working with cows and horses.
And if the series is to be believed, he couldn’t be happier. So it seems that Ostrum certainly made the right career choice back in the 1970s when faced with the possibility of a Hollywood future. Tending to sick animals has given the man his true purpose in life.
Royalty checks
Ostrum’s unlikely journey from Hollywood to veterinary practitioner might seem like a bit of a downer. But for the former child actor it was clearly the right move, and he still loves the job today. What’s more, he managed to avoid that destructive transition into adulthood that blights the lives of so many child stars.
But, if you’re only going to make one movie in your lifetime, you could do a lot worse than Willy Wonka. Particularly when that movie means you still get royalty checks every few weeks, more than 50 years on!