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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Congratulations to the young lady and Best Wishes to her! She’s got some Big Shoes to fill and we can only hope she doesn’t top them up with anything that should really be attached to someone else …
> Let Wednesday grow up and be a cranky elder goth! PLEASE.
Agree wholeheartedly. The Youtube series by Melissa Hunter from five or six years ago was exactly what I would have hoped to see in a new Wednesday show. All grown up, navigating a world she doesn’t fit in with her own dark sensibilities and doing so very well. This just sounds like another Sabrina. But yeah, I’ll probably still watch it because Tim Burton.
I still feel that Wednesday Addams would more likely be pleasantly intrigued by a monstrous killing spree, or even actively participate in one, than seek to thwart it.
@3. ChristopherLBennett
Exactly. Why would Wednesday want to STOP a killing spree
@3, 4 Perhaps she’s peeved about not being invited?
Eh,
1. I never thought of the Addams family as having magic or psychic powers or supernatural abilities, they were just differently normal.
2. Not sure about the murder thing. Although, are we going by the TV series, movies, or original comics (which I have seen the least of). The Addamses were never particularly murderous, other than Wednesday’s sibling rivalry with Pugsley (which, might suggest that Pugsley, at least, is slightly magical or at least unusually durable.). I think Wednesday would be morbidly fascinated with a serial killer, and would love to interview one in prison, but I’m not sure the Addamses would actually condone or participate in actual murder. I can picture the TV versions of Gomez and Morticia offering a guest some bizarre food dish laced with strychnine or arsenic, but it would have been innocent and they would be truly mystified when the guest ran away in terror, while they tucked in with no ill effect (again, durable maybe, but not magical.)
Actually what the synopsis sounds like is a Buffy retread, combining aspects of Buffy and Willow into Wednesday’s character.
@6/Thomas: The original New Yorker cartoons and particularly the Sonnenfeld movies implied that the Addamses engaged in some grisly goings-on off-camera. One of the cartoons showed them starting to dump boiling oil on some Christmas carolers, which would be a truly horrific thing to do to people.
And the iconic Christina Ricci version of Wednesday seemed like the most psychopathic one of them all. That’s what made the character so memorable, that this cute little girl was so cold and terrifying. So this is clearly a rather different take.
And that’s really my issue with doing what sounds like a straight coming-of-age/mystery series about the character. The charm of The Addams Family is its absurdity and playful moral inversion, turning the macabre and grisly into endearing family comedy and having the Addamses find joy and delight in everything that the rest of us would find horrifying or disgusting. It’s that clash between their values and ours that makes it funny. So having Wednesday pursue a conventional definition of justice doesn’t seem very Addamsy.
@7 Yeah, it’d be more like she’d debate on whether to join in or not. Or maybe even critique the killer
Jenna Ortega is a very talented actress so this is bound to be excellent.
@7/CLB
The boiling oil bit was done in the movie, as were several others from the cartoons. The movies are a lot darker than they first appear.
@3. ChristopherLBennett: Wednesday Addams came to Nevermore U to study, not for the extracurriculars! (and one can’t study at an institution if it’s closed because of a serial killer).
ALSO – I wonder if they’ll inveigle Ms. Christina Ricci into this production somehow (Perhaps she’ll get her chance to play Morticia?).
@10/wiredog: Oh, yes, the movies are the darkest incarnation. Some of their humor feels to me like it goes a little too far. But they’re faithful to the darker implications in the cartoons, more so than the TV sitcom was.