Not only did Jenna Ortega learn to play the cello, she took fencing, archery, canoeing, German, and boxing lessons to prep for her role.Wednesday very rarely blinks. She only seems to blink when she is injured or caught off guard. The idea came after trying one take where Jenna Ortega didn't blink", leaving director Tim Burton "so enamoured with the result he told Jenna Ortega not to blink anymore when playing Wednesday. So she didn't". Then, during her appearance on TODAY, Ortega said: "She doesn't blink. [Tim Burton] likes it when I tilt my chin down and look through my eyebrows, kind of like a Kubrick stare, and then I relax all the muscles in my face." Ortega did express that she "got kinda annoying about it on set", and that they "would have to restart a take if I started blinking], because sometimes you start crying." "[It was] Romanian winter, there was all this wind in my face," she concluded. "I learned to blink on other people's lines."As Christina Ricci replaced Thora Birch several scenes had to be reshot. Paying close attention during the first few episodes, it can be seen that Ricci acted in front of a green screen as none of her shots feature other characters (others only seen from behind) and are static shots (without movements).The Weathervane, the name of the coffee shop in the series, shares its name with the Westfield High School student literary magazine, where Charles Addams the creator of the Addams Family first started working as an art editor and published his cartoons.At 6'6" Romanian actor George Burcea is the shortest actor to play Lurch. Lifts in his shoes make him appear taller in the show.Gomez Addams has generally been portrayed in live-action as a suave, handsome character: John Astin in The Addams Family (1964); Raul Julia in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993); Tim Curry in Addams Family Reunion (1998); and Glenn Taranto in The New Addams Family (1998). Tim Burton wanted his appearance in the show to specifically resemble the Charles Addams depiction, where he was drawn as fat and porcine.The code to the entrance of the secret "Nightshades Society" is a double snap, the same type of snap that was used in the Addams Family Theme song on the original show and movies.The creators got a lot of mileage out of the height difference between Principal Weems (played by 6'3" Gwendoline Christie) and everyone else, especially Wednesday. Weems towers over the rest of the cast and is often filmed from a low angle to accentuate her height. Christie said in interviews she loved the glamorous look of the character.Principal Larissa Weems drew fashion inspiration from a Hitchcock classic. According to costume designer Colleen Atwood: "I bought this vintage poster of Tippi Hedren in 'The Birds.' I showed her a picture of it. I said, 'This is who I think you are. And she was like, 'I love it,'" Atwood recalls, calling Weems "her own kind of misfit, in a totally different way."Set a record for Netflix viewings figures with 341 million hours watched (over 50 million households) in the first week of release (November 2022), taking it to the Top One spot in many countries, surpassing the fourth season of Stranger Things (335 million hours)Wednesday lives in Ophelia Hall at Nevermore Academy. Ophelia was the name of Morticia's sister on the original Addams Family TV series.Only the first and last episode of the first season feature the full opening credits, all other episodes simply feature the title and episode name on screen.Miss Weems was the name of the family babysitter in the Charles Addams comics.Thing was played by Victor Dorobantu, a magician. Christopher Hart, also a magician, played Thing in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993).Gwendoline Christie recalled being starstruck when she was asked to participate in the Netflix series. "'Tim Burton would like to speak to you about his latest project. It's the Addams family,'" Christie recalled her agent telling her in a text. "And truly, I stopped and went silent. I'm fairly certain I atomized. And then by some mysterious force I came back together into something at least partially resembling a human being, and I had to just put the phone away and carry on. I didn't even say anything for a little bit because I just had to process." She eventually did speak to the director on a Zoom call, where he confessed that he was a big fan of her work as well. "At the end [of the call], I was really red in the face and I said, 'I'm sorry, I'm just so embarrassed and overwhelmed,'" she said, adding that Burton was equally embarrassed by the situation. "And he said, 'God, I want to hide under the table.'" Both Burton and Christie were able to overcome the awkwardness and work together, as the actress eventually signed on to play Principal Larissa Weems in the Jenna Ortega-led "Addams Family" series. Christie had nothing but good things to say about the experience, praising both Burton's artistic vision and the enthusiastic fan response to the project. "It's just inconceivable. I think the loveliest thing about it is that it seems to have made so many people happy. Such a wide range of different age groups are watching it and different people are watching it together. And it's a beautiful thing," she said. "This magnitude of response is totally unexpected, and I just feel full of gratitude to everybody involved that works so hard and to everybody for watching and enjoying it. I really do. It's very special."As seen in the first episode the Addams Family car's license is registered in New Jersey, the birth place of Addams Family creator Charles Addams.The typewriter seen in the title sequence uses a QWERTY keyboard layout. The typewriter Wednesday uses has a QWERTZ (German) layout.Christina Ricci (Mrs Thornhill) had previously starred as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993).Nevermore Academy is named after the Edgar Allan Poe poem "The Raven", where the bird continually quotes "Nevermore."In Principal Weems's office there is a huge stuffed bear. This alludes to the original series where the Addams had a giant stuffed bear in the hallway that would often startle visitors.Became top #1 on Netflix with over 341,000,000 hours streamed after just one week In the German version, "Thing" is called "eiskaltes Händchen" (means ice cold little hand).The Addams family limo was built for this feature.Jenna Ortega performed the wild dance set to The Cramps' 1981 single "Goo Goo Muck." while battling COVID-19. "I'd gotten the song about a week before and I just pulled from whatever I could it's crazy because it was my first day with COVID so it was awful to film," Ortega revealed during a recent NME interview. "Yeah, I woke up and it's weird, I never get sick and when I do it's not very bad, I had the body aches. I felt like I'd been hit by a car and that a little goblin had been let loose in my throat and was scratching the walls of my esophagus," Ortega continued. "They were giving me medicine between takes because we were waiting on the positive result." MGM, stressed to NME that "strict COVID protocols were followed and once the positive test was confirmed the production removed Jenna from set." "I asked to redo it but we didn't have time," Ortega added. "I think I probably could have done it a bit better." Ortega choreographed the dance scene herself. The actor's COVID revelation has led many viewers to criticize the production for allowing Ortega on set when she was showing COVID symptoms, even if she didn't have a positive COVID test at the time. Even with COVID, Ortega delivered a memorable dance that has become the talk of social media. The dance scene has gone so viral that "Goo Goo Muck" by The Cramps has increased its Spotify streams by 9.5% since "Wednesday" debuted. Pairing Ortega's "Wednesday" dance moves with Lady Gaga's song "Bloody Mary" has also become a viral TikTok meme, boosting that song's Spotify streams by more than 1,800% compared to the previous month.In an interview with Teen Vogue, Jenna Ortega said that she would perform autopsies on dead animals as a kid. More specifically the dead lizards she would find in her backyard.Jenna shared in a Teen Vogue interview that she had been vegan for a very long time, up until she started filming Wednesday in Romania. She is now a pescetarian.Jenna Ortega was announced to be playing Wednesday Addams on May 19 2021, a Wednesday.Colleen Atwood, the Oscar-winning costume designer, pulled together a medley of creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky and all-together ooky ensembles for the show "With Wednesday, we can nail the iconic look right away with a nod to the original pointed collar, little print dress and modernized platform shoes, and then put her in an environment that she totally contrasts with: an American happy-time public school," Atwood tells Variety of her reverence for the macabre teen's original outfit. "Then you've given the nod to all that's come before." "When we move to the other world of Nevermore, Wednesday's in a uniform that's specially made because she is allergic to color," she adds. "I wanted a gray and black stripe, but I didn't really like how they looked in the world. So I ended up having the stripes drawn and painted. We silkscreened all her stripes, so we got something that was a softer variation on a on a stripe, which is a fun process as a designer to be able to do." Wednesday's fashion couldn't be any more different from her roommate, a bubbly blonde with an affinity for rainbow colors. "Enid's (Emma Myers) the epitome of everything Wednesday hates: girly color, full of chatter," Atwood says. "We had so much fun playing off that with Enid. With the hard graphics of Wednesday's things, Enid's palette with the orange and the pink and the yellow were like a sunny contrast to her, which helped make them both look more different from each other as characters."The title to every episode in season one contains the word "woe".Deadline reported in Dec. 2021 that Thora Birch, who had finished filming the bulk of her role, had to step away for personal reasons. Thora Birch was set to play Tamara Novak, "Wednesday's dorm mother and the only 'Normie' at the Nevermore Academy with a focus on all things botanical." The article adds that the role "will not be recast, with producers looking to add a new character to the show's first season. It is unclear whether that character will take over for Tamara and help close out her planned storyline with both of them co-existing on the show or whether the new character will replace Tamara and Thora Birch's scenes will be reshot."The number on Gomez's jumpsuit is 171912: the date of birth of Charles Addams who created the Addams Family Wednesday says in a promotional video that homicidal maniacs "look just like everybody else.". This is a nod to the 1991 Addams Family movie.In the first episode, Wednesday says that she was born on Friday the thirteenth. The fifth episode features dialogue referring to an event that happened 32 years ago in 1990, which places the series in 2022. In the sixth episode, Wednesday observes her sixteenth birthday. This means that this version of Wednesday Addams was born in 2006 on either January or October 13. Since she begins attending Nevermore Academy in the middle of the school year, this narrows her birthday to January 13, 2006, with the series taking place in late 2021 to early 2022 (disregarding the unseasonable lack of Vermont snow).The main building of Nevermore Academy shares certain Gothic Revival architectural details with the Addams' family mansion.Series debut on Wednesday, November 23rd.Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers became incredibly close friends while filming the show. Even after the show's production ended, Ortega and Myers continued to regularly comment on each other's Instagram posts.Within three weeks of release, it became the second-most watched English-language Netflix series.Ortega was cast in part to represent the character's Latina heritage.During pre-production on the 1991 film, Tim Burton was approached to direct, but ended up passing on it due to scheduling conflicts with Batman and Batman Returns, resulting in Barry Sonnenfeld taking the job.Filming took place in Romania between September 2021 and March 2022.Wednesday states she's not interested in social media because she finds it a "soul-sucking void of meaningless affirmation". Ironically, however, she mentions at the same time typical social media terms like "mansplaining", "patriarchy" and "male-gaze", implying that she used or tried social media for a time at some point to learn them.Thornhill trying to get Wednesday to read Frankenstein hints at her plan to gather body parts so she can reanimate the corpse of her dead ancestor.Tyler's date at the crypt was meant to be used as a distraction to keep Wednesday out of her room long enough for Thornhill/Laurel Gates to ransack her room to locate the diary. Part of the date was watching "Legally Blonde." In order to have the maximum amount of time to search for the diary, Thornhill would likely have broken into Wednesday's room shortly after she left for the date at the crypt. Add up the time needed to reach the crypt, watch the movie, and return back to her room and that means that Thing could have been stabbed and Pinned to the Wall for at least two hours before Wednesday found him.Deliberately or not, the replacing of Thora Birch by Christina Ricci changes drastically the ending of the season: the revelation of her character Mrs. Thornhill's true identity in Wednesday: A Murder of Woes (2022) leads Wednesday to face her. Since that Ricci played the same role in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), the season ends with a battle between the former Wednesday against the new Wednesday.Tyler being the hyde was actually hinted in the third episode, when he's screaming in a bath, Wednesday's voice over say the word "monster"

Wednesday

Table of Contents

Show Trivia