Gwendoline Christie Joins ‘Addams Family’ Spinoff ‘Wednesday’ as Principal
They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky — and coming to Netflix. Tim Burton is directing a new Addams Family spinoff series about Wednesday Addams, appropriately titled Wednesday.
The streaming service announced the series in February 2021 and revealed the first look at the show’s artwork, which showed a silhouetted Wednesday playing the cello with a large knife instead of a bow.
Few other details about the eight-episode series have been released, but given Burton’s affection for horror-inspired, goth-tinged aesthetics, he and the Addamses should be a great fit.
The director, who will make his first foray into television with Wednesday, rose to prominence in the 1980s with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman. His next project, 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, arguably made stars of Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder (and was memorably parodied by Timothée Chalamet in a 2021 Super Bowl commercial).
Throughout his career, he’s repeatedly collaborated with many of the same actors, including Depp, Michael Keaton, Christina Ricci, Michelle Pfeiffer and his ex-girlfriend, Helena Bonham Carter. So far, none of those people have been announced as having any involvement in Wednesday, but it doesn’t hurt to dream about a bewigged Pfeiffer as family matriarch Morticia.
The Addams Family began as a series of single-panel New Yorker cartoons drawn by illustrator Charles Addams, running from 1938 until his death in 1988. The first Hollywood adaptation was a half-hour sitcom that ran from 1964 to 1966. Two animated series followed in 1973 and 1992, and a live-action series titled The New Addams Family ran from 1998 to 2001.
The first big-screen adaptation hit theaters in 1991, with a cast that included Ricci as Wednesday, as well as Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia and Christopher Lloyd. The sequel, Addams Family Values, premiered in 1993 and was followed by a direct-to-video reboot in 1998.
Finally, the spooky crew came back yet again in 2019’s animated The Addams Family, featuring voice work by Charlize Theron, Oscar Isaac and Snoop Dogg as Cousin Itt. A sequel to that version is due out in November 2021. Oh, and there was also a Broadway musical that premiered in 2010.
All of which is to say that this is hardly the first time someone’s tried to bring back the Addamses. It’s not even the first time Burton has tried to do so — he was attached to a stop-motion film version that was canceled in 2013.
It is, however, the first time anyone’s focused on Wednesday Addams alone, which is great news for fans of pigtail braids and the color black. Keep scrolling to find out everything we know so far about Wednesday:
In May 2021, Netflix announced that Jenna Ortega will play Wednesday in the new series. The You alum confirmed the news with a selfie posted to Instagram that showed her holding a script for the first episode. "New chapter," she wrote. "Hope I can do Wednesday Addams justice."
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Though none of the cast members from the earlier films are involved, there are several Addams Family alums slated to join the project behind the scenes. Andrew Mittman, Gail Berman and Kevin Miserocchi, all of whom worked on the 2019 Addams Family, are set to executive produce alongside Jonathan Glickman, who's an executive producer on The Addams Family 2.
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The show will follow Wednesday during her school days at Nevermore Academy. According to a press release, this includes Wednesday's "attempts to master her emerging psychic ability," as well as her mission to "thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago."
Netflix
In August 2021, Netflix announced that Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán were cast as Wednesday's parents, Morticia and Gomez Addams. "Thrilled!!!!" the Narcos alum wrote via Twitter after the news broke.
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Netflix rounded out the cast for the Addams Family spinoff with 10 additional main characters, the streaming platform confirmed via a press release.
Hunter Doohan, Georgie Farmer, Moosa Mostafa, Emma Myers, Naomi J. Ogawa, Joy Sunday, Percy Hynes White, Thora Birch, Riki Lindhome and Jamie McShane round out the Wednesday cast as various classmates, friends and neighbors of Ortega’s peculiar character.
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Gwendoline Christie was announced in September 2021 as a series regular. The Game of Thrones alum will play Larissa Weems, the principal of Nevermore Academy who “still has an axe to grind” with former classmate Morticia Addams (Zeta-Jones).
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