Charlotte Returns to Revenge as a Man in Season 5

The cast of ABC’s Revenge is up in arms after learning that long missing Charlotte will undergo a sex change and return as a vengeful man in Season 5!

As announced by ABC this week, Charlotte Grayson will finally be returning to Revenge—but Christa B. Allen won’t be playing her. Thanks to sources close to the show, Dan’s Papers can exclusively confirm that the character will return in the final moments of the Season 4 finale with a new face and a new body, played by newcomer Michael LaFranc. Following her stint in rehab, Charlotte will have undergone a sex change, providing a cliffhanger that the show hopes will help secure a fifth season.

“Everyone was stunned,” a source claims of the bombshell development. “We all knew there would be some kind of game-changing cliffhanger, since all the other stories wrapped up months ago, but nobody expected this.” The cliffhanger—in which a now-male Charlotte returns to the Hamptons under a new, assumed identity—is clearly a bid to shock the struggling series back to life and give it a much needed reboot.

Should Revenge get picked up for a Season 5, LaFrance will be a series regular and feature heavily. “The idea is that Charlotte has been burned so many times by so many people she thought she could trust that she has turned to the thing her family is best at—revenge,” our source says. Posing as a friend Charlotte made at rehab, “Niles Mayfair” will buy the beach house from David and start taking Hamptonites down using a green crayon. His main target will be, according to story outlines obtained by our source, his half sister Emily, who is now going by her given name, Amanda Clarke.

“The rest of the cast is very upset about this,” our source says. “Mike [LaFranc] is a good guy and a talented actor, but he’d basically become the star of the show. Madeleine [Stowe] and Emily [VanCamp] have threatened to walk, while James Tupper is livid that his character will no longer own the beach house.”

The show is also looking to recast Carl, who will be aged up to about 16. The quirky, outcast teen will be Niles’ confidant—the Nolan to his Emily, if you will.

For more on Revenge, read DansPapers.com’s Weekly Hamptons Revenge Recap on Mondays, and our weekly Revenge Top 5 on Thursdays.