Of course they announced the star of Wednesday on a Wednesday. Tim Burton’s live-action coming-of-age Addams Family spinoff will star Jenna Ortega (You) as the eldest Addams child.
Ortega has been acting since childhood, starting with small roles in everything from Days of Our Lives to Iron Man 3 (the vice president’s daughter) to Yes Day (pictured above). She played young Jane on Jane the Virgin, provides the voice of Brooklynn on Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous, and will be in the upcoming Scream.
She’s certainly got the deadpan expression nailed, as demonstrated in her Instagram post about the role.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CPD3qcEluzr/
Wednesday comes from the odd creative team of director Burton and showrunners Al Gough and Miles Millar, the duo behind Smallville, Into the Badlands, and Shannara Chronicles, among other things. It seems likely that the goal is to create a show that lands solidly between Burton’s gothy sensibilities and Gough and Millar’s more mainstream tendencies—a notion borne out by the show’s summary. As Variety reports, teenage Wednesday, a student at Nevermore Academy, is trying to “master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore.”
Are we getting Sabrina vibes or Riverdale vibes? Both? As Emmet Asher-Perrin pointed out when this show was announced back in February, why does it need to be another coming-of-age story? Let Wednesday grow up and be a cranky elder goth! PLEASE.
There’s no word yet on when the eight episodes of Wednesday will air, though one can only assume it’ll debut on a Wednesday.
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