Yahoo News How ‘Wednesday’ Brought a New Perspective to a TV Icon
Netflix’s spooky comedy Wednesday brings Charles Addams’ iconic and idiosyncratic characters back to television, this time as seen through the eyes of the Addams family’s precocious and morbid daughter. Jenna Ortega leads the series, executive produced by Tim Burton (who helmed four of the eight episodes), which earned 12 Emmy nominations for its debut season, including best actress for its 20-year-old star. Here, key takeaways in covering Wednesday this Emmy season.
WHY WEDNESDAY? A FAMILIAR CHARACTER WHO WAS STILL A MYSTERY
“[She] was a character that we all really loved, and nobody had spent a lot of time with,” co-showrunner Alfred Gough told THR. “It’s a character we’d only seen really as a [child] … but we didn’t know much about her. Her fearlessness and her ability to always be herself, that was interesting, and we thought, ‘What if she was a teenage girl? 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?’ ”
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TRULY “UNPROFESSIONAL” OR A TEMPEST IN A (GOTH) TEACUP?
“Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega admitted on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast in March. “There [were] times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional, in a sense, where I just started changing lines … I grew very, very protective of [Wednesday].” While her comments caused controversy, there’s evidently no bad blood among the creative team — Ortega will be an exec producer on season two and will star in Burton’s upcoming Beetlejuice 2, written by Gough and Miles Millar.
STAR, COLLABORATOR, VIRAL TIKTOK CHOREOGRAPHER
Ortega choreographed Wednesday’s dance moves in an episode. “I actually felt really insecure about this,” the actress revealed about the scene, in which Wednesday busts moves to The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” in a behind-the-scenes conversation posted on Twitter. “I think it’s very obvious that I’m not a dancer or choreographer.”
TIM BURTON’S TEAM RIDES AGAIN
Costume designer Colleen Atwood and composer Danny Elfman, reuniting with the director after such collaborations as Mars Attacks! and Alice in Wonderland, both earned Emmy noms for their work. The latter says he paid light homage to The Addams Family‘s classic theme, composed by Vic Mizzy. “Like with anything with Tim, when we’re doing something that comes from something else, he doesn’t want to lean on it,” Elfman told THR.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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