In Wednesday’s long-awaited second season, Wednesday Addams, perennial outsider, finds herself – bewilderingly – on the inside. After foiling the villain and saving Nevermore school, Jenna Ortega’s teenage misanthrope is the institution’s new “It-girl”. All eyes are on her, and predictably enough, she hates it. It’s a predicament to which the creators and stars of Wednesday can surely relate.
Netflix’s gothic comedy-drama – based on the dark, satirical characters concocted by cartoonist Charles Addams – finds itself in a similarly discomfiting spotlight. When the first season debuted in 2022, Wednesday was the streaming site’s third-biggest series ever. Ortega, its now 22-year-old lead, became movie-star famous nearly overnight. One episode even kicked off a viral dance trend. “Everything I do, whether it’s a success or a failure, it’s always a surprise to me,” says Tim Burton, who produces the series and has directed half of the episodes to date. “And I’m not the kind of person who goes, ‘Oh, this is why season one was successful, and therefore I know what to do.’ I don’t get very worried about this.”
In all its previous incarnations (among them a 1964 TV series, a couple of blisteringly funny early Nineties films and a hit stage musical), The Addams Family has centred around the family unit – an oddball household of macabre aristocrats. Wednesday swivelled to focus on just the elder Addams child, but showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar took pains to maintain the pith of the source material. “There’s so much in those Charles Addams cartoons,” Gough tells me. “They’re funny, they’re subversive.”
Millar gestures to the opening of season two, in which we rejoin Wednesday as she’s tied up in a serial killer’s bunker, surrounded by creepy dolls – something she describes as “my perfect vacation”. It is, says Millar, exactly the sort of incongruous image that Addams would have illustrated in his comic strip – “a total Charles Addams panel”. Wednesday, he adds, was all about “finding a slant on modern life – that subversion of the norm – that [Addams] did with Fifties America.”
When Burton was approached by Gough and Millar (previously known for their work on Smallville and films such as Shanghai Noon and Spider-Man 2), he was, he admits, in the middle of a “slightly dormant era”. Studio films such as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) and Dumbo (2019) had earned the Edward Scissorhands filmmaker some of the most dismissive reviews of his career, and Covid was about to grind the film industry to a halt. “It wasn’t necessarily like I was a huge Addams Family fan, or had a lifelong dream to do it,” he says. “But when I read that character, I just connected to it. It energised me in a way that I hadn’t felt in quite a bit of time.”
Adapting to the foreign clockwork of streaming television wasn’t always easy for Burton, who, by his own admission, “doesn’t watch much TV”. He recalls a meeting early on with Netflix, in which the company began breaking down the series into precise microdata: “They said, ‘In the first 10 minutes, this happens, in the second eight minutes, that happens, [and so on],’ and my brain just exploded. I thought, ‘What planet am I on?’”
What the series did create was an opportunity for Burton to re-engage with his funny side – it had been a driving force behind early films such as Beetlejuice and Ed Wood, but largely absent from his recent output. “I always say with comedy… something can be both funny to me and not funny at the same time,” Burton muses. “And it gets mixed up in my brain.” It’s a sort of comedic Schroedinger’s Cat that perfectly complements Wednesday’s strange marriage of humour and morbidity – what Burton describes as lurching “from family drama to horror comedy, to some kind of Scooby-Doo adventure”.
Burton is probably what you’d get if Wednesday Addams implanted her spirit into the body of a 66-year-old British man – the wry, moody sensibility; the all-black wardrobe. Directing the younger members of Wednesday’s cast was easy, he says, because “young people act older than I do – I’m about like 13 right now in my reversal age”.
Back in 2022, Ortega made headlines when she revealed, in an interview, that she had changed her lines on set because they “did not make sense for her character at all”, stating that she “had to put my foot down”. A mid-sized internet controversy ensued, but everyone involved in the show seems to have read Ortega’s behaviour as the work of a confident, committed actor. This season, she is included on the production team, and Gough, Millar and Burton have nothing but glowing things to say about her. “She does so much with so little,” says Millar. “Even though the character is cold and emotionless, she can lift an eyebrow and say a million things.”
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“You can’t just ask somebody to do Wednesday Addams,” says Burton. “They have to have it in their DNA. Jenna reminds me a bit of what Winona [Ryder] had when I first met her on Beetlejuice. That silent movie actor thing, where they don’t have to say anything. You just have Jenna stare at you, and you knew right away that was Wednesday.”
The second season brings in some heavyweight ringers for Ortega to bounce off, among them Billie Piper, Thandiwe Newton, Joanna Lumley, Steve Buscemi (previously directed by Burton on 2003’s Big Fish), and Christopher Lloyd, once a tour-de-force of mugging grotesquerie as Uncle Fester in the Nineties Addams films. It was Lloyd who reached out to Wednesday’s producers, asking to be involved. The role they found for him was Professor Orloff – a living, dismembered head in a jar.
Filming the role involved a complex new technology, in which Lloyd was encircled by cameras, captured from all angles at once. “I didn’t work with all of Christopher Lloyd – I just worked with his head,” Burton jokes. “I found it scary. I felt like I was walking into a science fiction movie. It’s fun to work with these things on a certain level, though I have some kind of negative energy towards technology. That’s not a joke!”
While the additions of actors such as Lloyd and Buscemi are sure to appeal to the show’s older viewers, what’s intriguing about Wednesday is just how much the series resonates with teens. Wednesday, Miller says, could easily be seen as an “aspirational” figure, in a prosaic, Generation Z sort of way. “She’s analogue! No cell phone, not tied to social media. Everyone’s thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I could be like her? And there’s a fearlessness: we live in an age where people can’t say what they think – and she says whatever’s on her mind.”
But perhaps the appeal of Wednesday, and of Wednesday, also lies in something deceptively universal: the unapologetic embrace of outsiderdom. “Everybody feels like an outsider,” says Gough. “It’s that feeling that we all have, that we are all outcasts.” It’s this that made Wednesday such a fitting project for Burton, a filmmaker who has spent his entire career exploring his own feelings of not fitting in – whether that’s channelled through Johnny Depp’s sharp-fingered Frankenstein creation in Edward Scissorhands, or Michael Keaton’s uneasy Bruce Wayne in Batman.
For all his success, Burton remains an outsider at heart. “I spent years trying to exorcise those demons,” he says. “But at some point, I just realised, these kind of feelings never really leave you. You can have everything – success, a family, a dog, whatever – but it doesn’t matter. Whatever that DNA is inside of you, it remains.”
Wednesday has already been renewed for a third season. (This one, the writers hope, should be quicker to arrive, absent the writers’ strike and other logistical delays that held up season two.) There are also discussions ongoing about a spin-off series, rumoured to focus on Fred Armisen’s Uncle Fester, though Gough and Millar confirm nothing solid.
The extent of Burton’s involvement in season three – at least when it comes to directing – is yet to be announced, with Millar previously suggesting it would depend on the filmmaker’s scheduling commitments. But Burton, for his part, says he enjoys the “spontaneous approach” of TV directing: “You don’t have time to brood, or overthink things.”
Where some auteur filmmakers are sniffy about working on streaming series, Burton seems wholly unconflicted. “I’m pretty haphazard about how and what I choose to make – as you could tell by my career,” he laughs. “I just kind of go, ‘Ooh, I’ll do that. That seems interesting.’ I don’t overly think about my legacy – or my tombstone.”
On this last note, we may have finally found something on which he and Wednesday Addams do not agree.
The first half of ‘Wednesday’ season two is streaming now on Netflix, with the final four episodes released on 3 September
