Just when you thought the people who are playing Andrew Wyeth’s Aunt Cora were ready to meet their new nemesis (especially Wyeth’s grandson Frank), comes this stinger from Thursday night’s episode of “Murdoch Mysteries.”
The episode, titled “Fiske & Seymour” revealed what appeared to be his American descendant Julia Ogden, the sister of famed painting family portraitist Andrew Wyeth (played by Hélène Joy) presented with a canvas of his family and adding a warning for her: “The granddaughter has a surprise.”
The reveal came as a shock not only to Ogden but also Joy, who was expecting Ogden’s ghost to pass this way.
“Julia’s been trying to find a way back. She wanted the family’s gift back, which I never knew about. Julia had been very distraught about it,” Joy said.
The artist’s family relationship has been a recurring theme in both the books and the series, but Joy, who played Molly Wyeth on ABC’s “The Family,” said she’s already gotten a lot of questions from fans about how Andrew Wyeth felt about the paintings.
“He loved them, but he had a hard time with the fact that they were made about his family,” Joy said. “This is an old family feud, but I think it’s gotten a lot of notoriety these last years since they were discovered. He never thought that the pictures were off-base or inaccurate. He thought that they were fair, but he felt they were too flattering. In the end, if Andrew Wyeth was telling the truth, there are things that are not portrayed in the pictures that we, as Algonquin family, needed to be represented.”
As for the scene, Joy said it was “a little bit of a nightmare.”
“I was expecting a ghost so I was trying to kill time. I’m just trying to run away as quick as I can. So I was kind of ahead of myself. I just thought it was a (preplanned) ghost of Aunt Cora and I couldn’t figure out how it was going to work,” Joy said. “The fun thing about a series is that anything can happen. Whatever it is, I guess it works out, I’m pretty proud of it.
She added: “I’m proud that the creative team, because this is the last thing I would have thought could happen to me — they ended up with Hélène Joy as Aunt Cora and I’m happy to support that.”