Wednesday: Netflix Reveals First Look at Its New Addams Family

Netflix has revealed the first look at its new Addams Family. Released via Vanity Fair, the production still shows Luis Guzmán as Gomez, Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia in the upcoming Netflix original series Wednesday, which focuses on the daughter of the family. While Tim Burton’s name is attached to the show, Miles Millar and Alfred Gough. They talked about what went into finding their new Gomez. “[Burton] wanted the silhouette to look more like the Charles Addams cartoons, which is Gomez shorter than Morticia, versus the kind of suave Raul Julia version in the movies,” Gough said.

Millar added, “He’s also incredibly debonair and romantic, and I think he has all those classic ingredients of the Gomez that we’ve seen come before, but he brings something also very different. That’s something that was very important to the show—that it didn’t feel like a remake or a reboot. It’s something that lives within the Venn diagram of what happened before, but it’s its own thing. It’s not trying to be the movies or the ’60s TV show. That was very important to us and very important to Tim.”

The creators reached out to Burton because they felt his sensibilities would match the show. They were surprised by how quickly he responded. 

“He was interested in where it was going, and the mystery of the show,” Gough says. “He had a lot of questions about the previous television work we’d done, and how we were able to achieve it. He really loved that you had time to be with Wednesday and explore the character and you didn’t have to, you know, wrap things up in an hour and 45 minutes.” Millar added, “The ambition for the show was to make it an 8-hour Tim Burton movie.”

Ortega previously offered her take on what makes Netflix’s version of Wednesday Addams special. “We’ve never seen her as a teenage girl,” Ortega told Entertainment Weekly. “You know, it’s funny and sweet and almost charming to hear this eight-year-old’s obsession with murder and blood and guts. As she gets older, that nasty attitude or [those] biting remarks, it’s almost kind of hard to not make it sound like every other teenage girl. So, it’s like, how do we establish this character and give her the same fire without letting her become something that she’s not? Also, it’s eight-hour series so, for an emotionless character, there has to be some sort of an emotional arc.”