The hit Netflix series ‘Wednesday’ which follows the iconically gloomy Wednesday Addams, played by rising star Jenna Ortega, as she adjusts to new relationships and a life away from her family at Nevermore Academy. There, she quickly faces the challenge of figuring out who has been killing her fellow students while attempting to avoid her own death. Season one of Wednesday, the renowned gothic filmmaker Tim Burton’s first foray into television, was a smashing success and quickly rose to the position of second-most watched English-language show on the enormous streaming service
With more than a billion view hours logged by users, Wednesday managed to maintain its position as one of the most watched TV shows on the streaming service this week. Al Gough and Miles Millar realised that centering the plot on one member of the family was a gamble, but happily it paid off even though The Addams Family is a rather powerful IP. The writers explained why Wednesday would be the series’ main character and, more crucially, why they intended to remove her from her family’s environment in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Gough said, “It was a character that we all really loved, and nobody had spent a lot of time with. And it’s a character we’d only seen really as a 10-, 11-, 12-year-old, who is part of a family and would have a funny line in the scene, but we didn’t know much about her. Her sort of fearlessness and her ability to always be herself with something, that was interesting, and we thought, well, ‘What if she was a teenage girl? And then what if you took her out of the family and put her in boarding school, which is ostensibly a new family? How would she react?’”
That choice was not made lightly. Gough and Millar had to exchange concepts in order to determine what would work. But when the initiative came together, they understood how crucial it was to take Wednesday to uncharted waters. Millar added, “We wrestled with that initially, in terms of, if we’re doing the teenage Wednesday Addams, is it funny if she’s the fish out of water in a regular high school? But then we felt like every day should get back to the family, and we sort of wanted her out of the family. And then the other thing about the boarding school offered was boarding in the world of the Addams Family. So you see, where did Gomez and Morticia go to school? What is that? How do these people exist in this real world? So, it excited us in terms of opened and expanded the world of the Addams Family, and that’s something, I think, certainly, people have been intrigued by.”
In addition to Ortega, other actors who appear in the film include Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia Addams, Luis Guzmán as Gomez Addams, Isaac Ordonez as Wednesday’s younger brother Pugsley, Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester, Christina Ricci as Marilyn Thornhill, George Burcea as Lurch, Gwendoline Christie as Principal Larissa Weems, Riki Lindhome as Dr. Valerie Kinbott, Jamie McShane as Sheriff Donovan Galpin, and Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay.