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COURTESY OF NETFLIX
SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for Season 2 Part 1 of “Wednesday.”
“Wednesday” is back, and this time, so is the Addams family.
In Season 2 of the hit
Netflix series, Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) returns to Nevermore Academy flanked by her relatives: her younger brother, Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), who is now a fellow student, and her parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), as Morticia has accepted a fundraising job on campus. But it’s not a happy reunion: Having her family around is a major source of irritation for Wednesday, especially because of the protections Morticia has tried to impose over her use of her psychic powers.
At the end of Season 1, Wednesday was beginning to come into her own as a psychic thanks to the connection she made with one of her ancestors, Goody Addams (also played by Ortega). And by her own metric, she mastered that ability over her summer break, using her visions to put bad guys to bed. (Cue: a deadly rendezvous with a serial killer called the Kansas City Scalper played by Haley Joel Osment). Lately, though, her visions have been accompanied by fainting spells and black tears on her face, which Morticia recognizes as a bad sign based on the experiences of her sister, Ophelia, whom she rarely talks about. Morticia warns Wednesday that she’s pushing herself too hard, and she seems to be right, because eventually, Wednesday loses her psychic ability altogether. While she’s confident she can get it back by consulting a spellbook that belonged to Goody, Morticia confiscates the book and demands that her daughter take some time to rest.
It’s good parenting, but bad timing, since Wednesday is in the middle of a terrifying new murder mystery. Not only have Sheriff Galpin (Jamie McShane) and a colleague of his been murdered by someone with the ability to control birds, but Wednesday’s last psychic vision predicted that Enid (Emma Myers), her roommate and best friend, would be the next victim — and that it would be Wednesday’s fault.
But with the help of Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen), Grandmama Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley) and her new protégé, Agnes (Evie Templeton), Wednesday eventually discovers L.O.I.S., the Long-term Outcast Integration Study, which is being conducted in secret at the Willow Hill Psychiatric Hospital by Judi Stonehurst (Heather Matarazzo). Though she was posing as the assistant of the head doctor (Thandiwe Newton), in truth, Judi is the murderous avian. Born a normie, she’s continuing the work of her father, Augustus (Philip Philmar), by learning to extract outcasts’ abilities and give them to others. Galpin had been in the middle of his own investigation about L.O.I.S. when he died, hoping to prevent Willow Hill from hurting his son, Tyler (Hunter Doohan), the hyde who was locked up for a string of murders he committed in Season 1.
Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester and Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams in “Wednesday.”Helen Sloan/Netflix
In the finale of Season 2 Part 1, Fester uses his electric powers to free all of the L.O.I.S. subjects — who begin attacking Judi — as well as everyone else being held at Willow Hill. Amid the chaos, Tyler kills fellow inmate Marilyn Thornhill aka Laurel Gates (Christina Ricci) for unlocking his inner hyde in Season 1 and landing him in the asylum. He almost kills Wednesday, too, throwing her through a glass window before escaping himself. In voiceover as the episode ends, Wednesday wonders whether her investigation has only made everything worse.
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“Wednesday” creators
Alfred Gough and
Miles Millar spoke with
Variety about the family relationships that anchor the show and what it will take to put things back together — as well as how “Smallville,” the Superman series they’re best known for, got them ready for the world of the Addamses.
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Let’s work backwards from the reveal that Willow Hill has been secretly taking outcasts’ powers to give them to normies. Why did you want to wrestle with outcast-normie relations in that way this season?
Alfred Gough: Season 1 was all about how outcasts fit into a normie world. That was Principal Weems’ [Gwendoline Christie] ethos. Principal Dort [Steve Buscemi] is very pro-outcast, which is just a different point of view, especially after the events of Season 1 with Tyler. There’s a hyde out there, and people are much more on alert, so the thin détente that existed between Jericho and Nevermore has gone away. So his thing is, “We’re going to circle the wagons and it’s going to be all about us supporting each other.”
The opposite of that, of course, is what they were doing at Willow Hill, where they wanted to exploit the outcasts. That idea of exploiting — you know, Wednesday’s exploiting her powers, which is why they’ve gone horribly awry for her. And there’s people exploiting outcasts. Even Dort, for all of his talk, he’s exploiting Bianca [Joy Sunday], right? That’s a big theme. In a lot of movies that deal with the supernatural, it’s hidden from the world. In “Harry Potter,” nobody knows about the magic world in the muggle world. We wanted it out in the open, but then, what is the next iteration of that? How would people actually respond and react?
Miles Millar: It also came from, “Where would would Tyler go?” We liked having a “Shock Corridor” element this season. The mental asylum felt very Addams-y, and finding new environments outside the school to explore visually. And we wanted Tyler in the show because the Wednesday-Tyler relationship feels so complex and interesting that we didn’t want to lose that.
How did the characters of Judi and Augustus Stonehurst emerge to you specifically?
Gough: With this hospital, there’s always rumors swirling around, like, “Oh, I hear they do experiments in the basement.” You want to know, “Who is it [in charge]?” And the idea that her father taught at Nevermore and was interested in what the outcasts were up to, and coveting those abilities.
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Millar: All roads lead to Nevermore. Everything has to come back there with the Addams family. That’s what roots the show, so Judi and Stonehurst feel connected in that way to the lore of the show.
Hunter Doohan as Tyler Galpin in “Wednesday.”HELEN SLOAN/NETFLIX
With Tyler being held at Willow Hill and the reveal that Sheriff Galpin was trying to save him from L.O.I.S., it feels like this season is largely about questioning whether Tyler — and everyone else in the asylum — can truly be rehabilitated. What were you thinking through while building the world of Willow Hill? It’s a kooky, Addams-y space, but it’s also portrayed as a pretty brutal prison.
Gough: Tyler is so cards-down in Season 1. He’s kind of playing a part, and he’s not revealed until the end. The idea is that now that the mask is off, what is that? And how does Wednesday feel about that? Wednesday sees the world in black and white, and thinks he’s a monster. He’s locked away. That’s where he should be. There’s no rehabilitation for him, nor does she want it. But for Galpin, he went through this with his wife, and now the same fate has befallen his son. Now, he’s a broken man. Even though Tyler wants nothing to do with him, he wants to believe that there’s still good in him, which is a very parental thing to do. You have the Addams family, who are kooky and weird and built on love, and then you have the Galpins, who are kind of built on secrets and resentment. It’s about him trying to claw his way back.
Tyler’s dad just died, his mother is already dead, he kills Thornhill and Wednesday hates him. Even if he could be rehabilitated, he has no relationships left. What kind of life does he have to come back to?
Millar: That’s the question we hopefully answer in Part 2. What is that life, and what is possible for him? Hopefully, what happens is surprising but also inevitable. In Part 2, we see Tyler’s life outside the asylum, and that’s something to look forward to that we enjoyed unpacking as we went through.
As you said, Tyler presents this sweet, dorky facade in Season 1. As the people who write him, do you think any of that was real? Or was it all a show? Do we know the real Tyler at all yet?
Gough: I think some of it was genuine. He was a kid who didn’t know who he was, and secrets were kept from him by his father. That’s the thing with Thornhill. It’s a blessing and a curse that she told him who he was and helped him unlock that part of himself. You could say Tyler is really the tragic figure in this story. He’s kind of trapped in his circumstances, and the choices he’s made have all been driven by people keeping things from him. He’s always been used or manipulated or lied to. The monster is not just what he is — it’s what he’s been turned into.
Going back to the idea of exploiting outcasts’ powers, what were you trying to say with the psychic block that Wednesday experiences this season? It’s a nice device to keep her from solving the mystery too easily, but it also messes with her sense of identity and self.
Millar: Wednesday always wants to control everything, so she loses that sense of control because she exploited her own power without fully understanding it. Wednesday goes into situations half-cocked, and sometimes it works out great, and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s something she has to learn about growing up: You can be reckless, but there are consequences to that.
Her psychic ability is tied up with her relationship to her ancestor, Goody Addams, and that tension unfolds while Tyler grapples with the deaths of his parents. Judi, too, is ruled by the work her father did before he lost his mind. Were you thinking about these generation-spanning storylines in tandem? Or does this world just naturally lend itself to family conflict?
Gough: It’s very much a design. At the heart of the show, we’re really a family drama. You have these different families, and it allows you to see the world through their different lenses. Judi revered her father and was happy to be part of his experiments, and that’s different. It was a twisted relationship, but she sees herself as carrying on her father’s legacy in a strange, cult-like way. The show is about people wearing masks, and once they’re unmasked, who they really are underneath. Just like Season 1 all came back to the Addams family secrets with Morticia and Gomez.
Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia Addams and Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams in “Wednesday.”JONATHAN HESSION/NETFLIX
Tell me more about Wednesday and Morticia’s relationship. Wednesday wants to use her powers maximally, Morticia wants her to shut things down completely, and the best path forward is probably somewhere in between those approaches. Why was Goody’s book such a big symbol this season?
Millar: It gives great consequence and meaning. She loses it in the sword fight with Morticia. She goes into that thinking she’s going to easily defeat her mother, which she gets wrong, because Morticia is an expert swordmaster. Then Morticia makes the reckless and impulsive decision to burn it in front of Hester. It actually plays a lot of different functions: It’s this chalice that Wednesday holds out hope that she can use to fix herself, and then it becomes this token in the family struggle between three generations of Addams women.
What are you ready to tease about Season 2 Part 2?
Gough: At the end of Part 1, she’s literally blown up the world. Once she’s let everyone out, what has she unleashed? And how is she gonna be able to contain it? Wednesday is, in some ways, her own worst enemy, and her hubris always comes back to haunt her. We wanted to structure the season differently than Season 1, which was a closed whodunit until the end of Episodes 7 and 8. Here, you have this one mystery, and you solve part of that mystery, but then you unleash something.
Millar: We wanted to close the doors and make the first four episodes feel like a satisfying meal, but there’s a lot more. You want dessert, and dessert is Part 2. We were very focused on making sure that doors closed, but there are a lot of doors that are swung open as well.
There were a lot of changes in how Season 2 was produced compared to Season 1. The two-part structure, shooting in a new location, elevating Jenna Ortega to a producer role — how did things feel different this time around?
Gough: The move from Romania to Ireland has been great. Miles and I shot in Ireland for six years before on “Into the Badlands,” so we were very familiar with it. We loved the crew there and knew that we were going to be able to expand the scope of the world. What’s also great for the cast with Ireland is they don’t care about actors or famous people. They just don’t, which is nice.
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Millar: There’s a sense of normalcy. You can walk around in the streets of Dublin and absolutely no one’s going to bother you. That’s very liberating for the actors of a show of this success. You’re not gonna get trailed by paparazzi. The island’s a beautiful place, and the people are so kind, so that was a big benefit.
And the relationship with Jenna as a producer has been fantastic. Even in the first season, she was very involved in the scripts, and we always got them to her early and got her notes. So it’s very collaborative, and it always has been an incredibly collaborative partnership with her. To formalize it in this way has been great. She’s really interested in not only what happens in front of the camera, but behind the scenes, so giving her insight into how a show of this magnitude is run is has been really interesting for her, and informative.
Gough: We could get her input earlier, which is always helpful. Not every actor is like this, but she very much has a 360 view. A lot of actors are concerned about their part, and not really the whole piece. But she keeps that kind of eye and is very interested. She’s gonna have a very long career, and it won’t just be as an actor. She intuitively brings a lot to the table, and now, she can see how a show of this size and scope works. It’s been great.
“Wednesday” is an interesting line on your resumes as the creators of “Smallville,” which dealt with a similarly massive intellectual property but still allowed you to create a very different world than the one that already existed. What lessons from that show have you brought into this one?
Millar: There’s no “Wednesday” without “Smallville.” That’s particularly true of the family dynamic. The Kents are another aspirational family. It’s very different from the Addams family, but interestingly enough, when we created “Smallville,” we got a lot of resistance from the studio about the relationship between the parents and the and the kids. Remember this, Al?
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Gough: It was the era of “Dawson’s Creek” and “Buffy.” In “Buffy,” the grown-ups are nonexistent, except for Giles [Anthony Stewart Head]. And in “Dawson’s Creek,” the kids were smarter than the parents. But we wanted a very functional relationship where Clark [Tom Welling] went to his parents, because he had to. They were the only ones who knew his secret, and they loved him and were supportive, but they were also parents. They set boundaries and had discipline, and that’s something that, frankly, both parents and kids really responded to.
With the Addams Family, it’s similar in that you’re telling an untold chapter of a character. Our philosophy was they can be a family that loves each other, but it doesn’t mean that they’re a family that doesn’t have conflict. That gives us great drama, but also deepens the relationships and makes them feel like a real family. Morticia and Wednesday have a very heightened mother-daughter relationship, where they solve their their fights with swords. Like she says, “We don’t solve anything with words. We do with deeds, most of them dirty.” And you also see Morticia’s relationship with her mother, and her mother was a very different mother than Morticia is. She was a working mom all about her job, and Morticia, in a way, is trying to go against that.
Millar: And we always saw “Smallville” as looking at two different kinds of parenting: the Kents’ parenting and then Luthors’. Lionel [John Glover] and Lex Luthor [Michael Rosenbaum] had a very different relationship than the Kents did. Families and parents and kids are a theme of all our work. Those relationships are so primal and important.
Another thing is that we always wanted that show to push the realm of what visual effects could do on TV, and to be as cinematic as possible. That’s definitely a signature through all our shows. We had Professor Orloff this season, and that was a real challenge, like, “How are we going to do that?” And then to get Christopher Lloyd — when you think about his iconic roles, he’s always been at the forefront of visual effects, in “Roger Rabbit” and “Back to the Future.” And he’s Fester in the “Addams Family” movies, so it felt like he was a perfect guy to do it. We’re always pushing what visual effects can do in the medium. Definitely, we are grateful to “Smallville”and the legacy of that show for us.
Would you ever go back to the world of Superman?
Gough: It’s hard. There was no Marvel Cinematic Universe back then. The last iteration of Superman had been “Lois & Clark,” so we were allowed to do things that, frankly, we wouldn’t be allowed to do today. We had the right story for the right time, and we’re so grateful we got 10 years to tell it. But there have been other iterations of Superman. “Superman & Lois” was a really terrific show. This new “Superman” movie is fantastic. So we were happy to do it, but I don’t think it’s something we’re looking to revisit.
Before “Wednesday” premiered in 2022, there was obviously a lot of interest, but no one knew it would become one of Netflix’s biggest shows ever. It has such a wide variety of fans across all demographics. Nearly three years later, how have you reflected on that success? Why do you think Season 1 resonated so deeply?
Gough: People are fascinated by the Addams family. And I think it’s because they’re a family that love each other because of their differences, not in spite of them. And also, the idea that everybody feels like an outsider. The thing that struck us was how many people related to Wednesday.
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Millar: It could be a 10-year-old kid, or it could be an 80-year-old. It’s a unifying idea that everyone feels like they’re an outsider and alone, and she’s this force of nature. I think that’s aspirational. And to a younger demographic, she’s someone who says, “I don’t need to use a phone. I don’t need to use technology.” We’re all in this state of addiction, and she’s someone who says, “Nope. I don’t need to do that.” That’s something that people can look up to. And in a world where people are afraid to say what they what they feel or what they think, she’s fearless and will say whatever’s on her mind. Some of the choices she makes aren’t great, and she has to suffer the consequences, but it’s a very inspirational character. Someone asked us what the demo was for the show, and the demo is everybody, literally. It’s uniq
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