Cara mia, mi amor! Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán transform into Morticia and Gomez Addams in a first look at the gruesome brood of Netflix’s upcoming series, Wednesday.
Jenna Ortega will portray the eponymous Wednesday, while Isaac Ordonez will portray her brother Pugsley. Vanity Fair shared an exclusive first look at the Addams brood in all their gothic glory.
Filmmaker Tim Burton will direct four of the eight episodes, as well as executive produce the comedy horror series from creators Miles Millar and Alfred Gough (Smallville). It marks his first foray into television.
Billed as a “sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery,” the series will follow Wednesday as she navigates life at Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for outcasts. The teen “attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore,” per the synopsis.
“We’ve never seen her as a teenage girl,” Ortega previously told EW of the beloved character. “It’s funny and sweet and almost charming to hear this 8-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… I’ve never had the opportunity to play an iconic character before. I know she’s well-loved and well-respected and I just don’t want to mess her up.”
Gough told VF that Burton wanted the creative aesthetic to resemble more of the Charles Addams cartoons, “which is Gomez shorter than Morticia, versus the kind of suave Raul Julia version in the movies.”
Speaking of Guzmán, he said, “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,” Millar added.
Matthias Clamer/Netflix Jenna Ortega on ‘Wednesday’
“That’s something that was very important to the show — that it didn’t feel like a remake or a reboot,” Millar continued. “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.”
As for the most glaring character omission in the family portrait, Gough and Millar remained tightlipped on details about the elusive Uncle Fester, including which actor has been tapped to play him. “We have no comment on Uncle Fester,” Gough told VF. “Just watch the show.”
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