“The Golden Ticket” stars know what you thought about the lickable wallpaper challenge: ‘You had to get in there’
“The Golden Ticket” stars know what you thought about the lickable wallpaper challenge: ‘You had to get in there’
Daysia TolentinoThu, September 24, 2026 at 2:00 PM UTC
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Ava in ‘Wonka’s The Golden Ticket’Credit: Courtesy of NetflixKey Points -
Wonka’s The Golden Ticket contestants Hunter Church and Kayla Simone dished on what it was really like to get down and dirty in the lickable wallpaper challenge.
The high-stakes challenge, which led to a double elimination, required players to find letters hidden behind candy-coated fruits on the wall.
The sandpaper-like candy walls were a task to lick through — plus they weren’t allowed to use their hands or teeth.
This article contains spoilers for episode 5 of Wonka’s The Golden Ticket.
If the lickable wallpaper scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory made your mouth water, Wonka’s The Golden Ticket may ruin your appetite.
While Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder) proposed the candy-coated invention as “lickable wallpaper for nursery walls” in the 1971 film, the challenge inspired by the scene in The Golden Ticket is a little less wholesome.
In episode 5 of the Wonka-themed competition show, three players — Kayla Simone and mother-daughter duo Kellye Cash and Tatum Sheppard Filegar — were put at risk of elimination after they were each selected by safe contestant Ziad Mansour as team captains for the wallpaper challenge. The captain of the losing team would end their journey there, or be “terminated,” as the disembodied AI voice of Wilder’s Wonka put it.
The challenge? Each team gets assigned a room and must find the letters hidden behind the candy-coated fruits on the wall. The rooms are divided into three difficulty levels — hard, harder, and hardest — with the most challenging room having the most letters to find. Simone, who had a target on her back from the previous challenge, was tasked with leading the hardest team.
Hunter, Everett, Shawn, Kayla, Ava in episode 105 of ‘Wonka’s The Golden Ticket.’Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
And while the game might sound easy enough, once the players started, it was clear that they were going to have to put their backs into it. And boy, did they go to work!
The players tell Entertainment Weekly that the candy coating was thick, at times unsavory, and time-consuming to get through. Simone, who is a self-proclaimed “germaphobe,” calls the game her “worst nightmare.” Still, she was determined to make it out of the challenge alive, even though she knew the cards were stacked against her.
It may seem like a simple task to remove the candy coating from each spot, but the contestants revealed that they were only allowed to use their tongues: no teeth, no hands, just tongues.
“It was at least a minute per letter,” Simone tells EW. “The candy coating was thick, so you had to get in there. You had to apply pressure, so you had to have a lot of spit, a lot of pressure, and a lot of motion to get to that letter.”
Thus, the contestants set off on a stomach-churning race for their captains’ lives. They got on their hands and knees, stood on each other’s backs, and climbed onto each other’s shoulders to lick every inch of the wall. As you can imagine, it got a bit… PG-13 at times.
Indeed, the players looked wet and wild, bracing themselves against the wall as they put their tongues to paper. Evidence of the challenge was smeared across their faces, with their noses and mouths covered in browns, blues, and oranges. Some even embraced the suggestive positions that they were put in, with contestant Hunter Church jokingly calling his method “the Lickmaster 5000.” (“Put it on a shirt!” he quips to EW.)
Hunter in episode 105 of ‘Wonka’s The Golden Ticket.’Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
As for what Church thought when he finally watched the scene back, he says, “It was so incredible to see on TV.”
“It was funny at some parts,” Church adds, sharing that he watched the show with his mother and girlfriend. “But then, I’m looking at my girlfriend. She’s got like a little smirk on her face. I’m looking at my mom, and she’s like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was a lot. It was cool, though.”
Once the door to his team’s room opened, he was ready “to go crazy” on the walls, which he says tasted like fruit.
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“The negative vibes of being in the hardest challenge went away as soon as the door opened and I saw it was the lickable wallpaper,” he recalls. “I’m like a huge Willy Wonka fan, so instantly I was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re here. We’re gonna have to be licking the walls.’”
The lickable wallpaper challenge was inspired by this scene in 1971’s ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’Credit: Netflix
But when he looked around at his teammates Everett Toy, Shawn Johnson, Ava Ganz, and Simone, Church admits he felt his tongue skills would have to carry the group. At one point, he saw Toy licking “like a cat” and knew it wouldn’t be enough to get through the sandpaper-like wall candy.
“I’m like, okay, I feel good in my capabilities of licking the wall, but my team that I was with, I was like, ‘Oh, God,’” he says. “Poor Everett, like, I don’t know how he’s gonna do. And then Shawn, too. I think at one point I joked, I was like, ‘I don’t know when the last time she licked something was.’ So just again having fun with it. But I’m looking at my team, and I’m like, ‘I’m about to put my back, literally and figuratively, in this challenge.’”
Church did have a slight advantage, saying he was able to “use my beard almost like some type of scrubber” at the end of each lick. But anyone who watched this episode knows he went all-in on those walls, beard aside. He admits to this with pride, adding that he had no qualms about how he looked going through the room.
“I am just myself,” he says. “I want to have fun. I want to give things 100 percent so there was never a time, not in this challenge or in any challenge, where I would shy away.”
Nick, Jason, Sasha, Gabby, Jay, Kellye, Everett, Tatum, Jeffrey, Ava, Shawn, Marcy, Garrison, Dillon, Joanne, Hunter, Bryce, Dan, Kayla, Taylor, Austin, Ziad, Jackson, Bill in season 1 of ‘Wonka’s The Golden Ticket.’Credit: Remco Jansen/Netflix
Although the candy started off delectable enough, the work became gross and slightly painful after a while. Simone says that they had licked the walls for at least 30 minutes, leaving their faces tender.
“All I know is my tongue was raw, my nose was raw, my lips were raw, like everything was raw,” she says. “But I was like, ‘We got to keep going.’”
To make matters worse, the hardest team members told EW they were still missing a letter after licking all the fruits. Although it wasn’t shown, they had to go over the entire licked-through room again.
“Clearly, somebody did not lick to the bottom of their letter,” Simone explains. “We’re missing a letter, so we all stared at each other like, no one remembered which fruits they licked. And we all just looked at each other, and we were just like, ‘Well, we don’t want to go home, so we got to get to it.’ So we did have to lick over God knows how many people’s fruit. I don’t know how many people’s spit I licked in that room.”
Inside Willy Wonka’s factory in ‘The Golden Ticket’Credit: Courtesy of Netflix
Unfortunately, the challenge ended in a loss for Simone, who was eliminated from the show after her team finished the game last. In a surprising twist, she had to take one of her teammates with her, so she chose Johnson, who had pleaded for her place in the game by explaining that she was unable to retire from her job as a teacher because she needed money to care for her sick mother.
The move came as a shock to everyone, Church said. However, Simone shared that she had developed better relationships and rapport with the other players in her room. And while Simone said she had tried to protect Johnson “where I could” behind-the-scenes, she didn’t feel that the teacher deserved her spot more than the others.
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“There was nobody I could have sent home without feeling like I backstabbed them,” Simone said. “I don’t believe that anything you are going through, or anything that you have been through, makes you any more entitled than anybody else to be there or win the money. The world that we live in, we all need this money.”
The first seven episodes of Wonka’s The Golden Ticket are now available on Netflix. The two-part season finale drops on Sept. 30.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
