TV SERIES · 2022–present · USA
Wednesday
- Created by
- Miles Millar, Alfred Gough
- Network
- Netflix
- Seasons
- 3
- Episodes
- 16
- Studio
- MGM Television, Millar Gough Ink, Toluca Pictures
50 archived facts 7 topics 2 sources Last reviewed Nov 2026
Smart, sarcastic and a little dead inside, Wednesday Addams investigates twisted mysteries while making new friends — and foes — at Nevermore Academy.
50 Interesting Facts About Wednesday
Interesting Facts (7)
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Tyler's date in the basement was a distraction to keep Wednesday away from her room while Thornhill/Laurel Gates searched it for the diary. Part of the date involved watching "Legally Blonde." To have the maximum amount of time to search for the diary, Thornhill must have likely entered Wednesday's room shortly after Wednesday left for the basement date. Add up the time needed to reach the grave, watch the film and return to her room; Thing could have been stabbed and pinned to the wall at least two hours before Wednesday found him.
Production Story (10)
- #008
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."
Wednesday (2022): Jenna Ortega in front of a Wednesday Season 2 backdrop with Netflix logoImage: Wikimedia Commons · Irene Suwandi, CC BY 3.0 - #009
When asked if it was her dark sense of humor that made her land the role, Jenna Ortega revealed that the casting process was in fact last minute. After getting to know that the legendary filmmaker Tim Burton wanted to meet her, Ortega was so "excited" to meet Burton that she could not even grasp the scale of the series. When asked about the potential reasons that led to Burton seeking her, Jenna Ortega suggested that it was either her "dry sense of humor" or prominence in the horror genre. She added: "Honestly, I don't know if it was a dry sense of humor more so than I had a lot of horror projects coming out and I was coming up on the horror scene a little bit."
- #010
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); 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.
- #011
Deadline reported in December 2021 that Thora Birch, who had finished filming most of her role, had to step away for personal reasons. Birch was set to play Tamara Novak, described as "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 them co-existing on the show or whether the new character will replace Tamara and Thora Birch's scenes will be reshot." The replacement character was Marilyn Thornhill, played by Christina Ricci.
- #012
Jenna Ortega revealed that she passed on the role several times before ultimately taking it. She credited Tim Burton for believing in her and convincing her to appear. She stated: "The only reason I went back is because Tim is such a legend, and we just happened to get along very well. But even then I said, 'Ah, no I think I'm OK,' a couple [more] times."
Wednesday (2022): Jenna Ortega and a woman in conversationImage: Wikimedia Commons · Margaret Gardiner, CC BY 3.0 - #013
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- #015
Lady Gaga's previously unreleased song "The Dead Dance" was shared with the production team through a streaming link that expired after 24 hours. Downloads were disabled and the audio was heavily watermarked to prevent leaks. Even the choreographer heard the song only once and rehearsed the dance sequence using an isolated drum track.
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Behind the Scenes (11)
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As Christina Ricci replaced Thora Birch after filming had already begun, 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 are only seen from behind) and are static shots (without movements).
- #020
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 originally pointed collar, little print dress, and modernized platform shoes, and then put her in an environment that she 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 like how they looked. So, I ended up having the stripes drawn and painted. We silkscreened all her stripes, so we got something softer variation on a stripe, which is a fun process for a designer." Wednesday's fashion couldn't be any more different from her roommate, a bubbly blonde with an affinity for rainbow colors. "Enid's the epitome of everything Wednesday hates, the 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."
- #021
- #022
Principal Larissa Weems drew fashion inspiration from an Alfred Hitchcock classic. According to costume designer Colleen Atwood: "I bought this vintage poster of Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963). 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 kind of misfit, in a different way."
- #023
The creators got a lot of mileage from 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.
- #024
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 enamored with the result he told 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, like a Stanley 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."
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Jenna Ortega choreographed her dance to the Cramps' "Goo Goo Muck" herself, drawing inspiration from Siouxsie Sioux, Bob Fosse and goth dance club footage from the 1980s. She filmed the dance while experiencing body aches and a sore throat, receiving medicine between takes while awaiting a COVID-19 test result; MGM confirmed she was removed from the set after testing positive, and although she asked to reshoot the scene, there was not enough time.
Characters & Cast (3)
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Jenna Ortega didn't ask Christina Ricci for advice on her character: "I didn't want to rip her off," she said. "I felt like I didn't want to pull up something she did 30 years ago," she told MTV News. "For the sake of my benefit, but two, yeah, I didn't want to rip her off, and I didn't want to be too much like her." However, she was aware of taking over a beloved role and was anxious. "I've never played such an iconic character whom I grew up respecting so much," she said. "So I think, when you respect someone so much, you just want to do right by them and by everybody else who fell in love with her for a very good reason."
Wednesday (2022): Wednesday Addams and a woman sitting at an eventImage: Wikimedia Commons · Margaret Gardiner, CC BY 3.0
Easter Eggs & References (15)
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The shop's name "Uriah's Heep" is a reference to the antagonist from the novel "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens. The fictional Uriah Heep is a malicious liar and may well be based on the well-known Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. The character Uriah Heep is believed to be inspired by at least the physical appearance of Andersen, who alienated Dickens when he overstayed on a visit to Dickens' family.
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Ophelia, as in Ophelia Hall, was the name of one of the prime female characters in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, where she was driven insane by her love for Hamlet and committed suicide by drowning. This dark connection could also be another reason for the name of that part of the school. Ophelia was the name of Morticia's sister on The Addams Family (1964), who was modeled on a famous painting of Shakespeare's Ophelia.
- #037
Christina Ricci's character is named Thornhill. This is possibly a nod to The Omen series of films (1976-2006), where the family name (and therefore the name of the human form taken by the Antichrist) was Thorn. It might also be a reference to Cary Grant's character in North by Northwest (1959), a film by Alfred Hitchcock, who is probably most famous for horror-themed films such as Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963).
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Jenna Ortega played Harley Diaz on the 2016-18 Disney+ series Stuck in the Middle (2016). In the first few minutes of the first episode, Harley states that she is the 4th of 7 children, so "if my family were a week, I'd be Wednesday." This series ended in July 2018. Jenna was chosen to play Wednesday Addams in May 2021, almost three years later.
- #042
In the first episode, Wednesday says 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 began 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).
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Deeper Meaning (3)
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Wednesday Addams was named after a line from an English nursery rhyme intended to teach children the days of the week and predict their fortune based on what day of the week they were born. Children born on Wednesdays were considered bad luck and destined for sorrow. The rhyme goes: "Monday's child is fair of face; Tuesday's child is full of grace. Wednesday's child is full of woe; Thursday's child has far to go. Friday's child is loving and giving; Saturday's child works hard for a living. But the child that is born on the Sabbath day, is bonny, blithe, good, and gay."
- #048
Contains a major spoiler — show
Tyler's date at the crypt was meant to be 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." 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 to her room; Thing could have been stabbed and pinned to the wall for at least two hours before Wednesday found him.
- #049
Life & Family (1)
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- Wikipedia
- IMDb
Sources for the entries on this page
- Wikipedia Wednesday (TV series) — Wikipedia
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