Jenna Ortega has more than once acknowledged that before Wednesday came along, friends and family in her life were already comparing her to the Addams Family’s woeful daughter, a character originally created by Charles Addams more than 90 years ago. With season 2 nearly upon us, she appears poised to make that likeness exact.
During a recent conversation with Den of Geek magazine about Ortega’s new film, Death of a Unicorn, the actor opened up about her appreciation for the original Charles Addams conception of Wednesday Addams and her larger kooky family. Ortega also confirmed that one of the things she sought to bring to the second season was taking more inspiration from those early, often bleakly amusing cartoons which originated in The New Yorker in 1933.
“In between season 1 and season 2, I actually went to this antiquarian bookshop and I picked up some of the first published books of Charles Addams,” Ortega says. “I kept that on my bedside table as we were shooting just for reference. You know, looking at [his] dark tools.” Ortega, who is also an executive producer on the second season of Wednesday and has a larger hand in shaping the tone, says she looked at both Addams’ original cartoons as well as the wider real world the artist drew upon.
“I had another book of his that was just stuff that inspired him throughout the years,” says Ortega. “Like weird families and weird things like that.”
A warm and well-liked man throughout his lifetime in the 20th century, Charles Addams was also considered weird in some circles. Perhaps it was because he enjoyed picnicking in cemeteries, or that he and his third wife, Marilyn “Tee” Matthews, were actually married in one—her pet cemetery, to be exact—but the real Chaz Addams developed a reputation befitting his creations, who at least initially on the page were not intended to be a family. The idea of the “Addams Family” came from New York ad men referring to his popular cartoons as “Addams’ family of ghouls,” a line that stuck after ABC developed the idea into a TV show. It was for that series, too, that Addams named his characters, including Wednesday.
Still, the original Addams Family TV series of the 1960s could never quite reach for their creator’s most macabre slices of humor. But Ortega can.
“It was interesting,” Ortega says of the second season, “when you [could suggest], ‘Maybe we have these supernatural extras that look like this image!’ Things like that were really helpful. And also it would just help me get in that mind space of when we’re shooting a scene. Instead of thinking like, ‘Okay, I can make a snarky comment to my brother,’ I could [instead] push him off this cliff and almost kill him. There was a moment or two there of that.”
She adds, “I think reading [those books] and digesting that stuff kind of helps you, whether you realize it or not.”
Ortega’s comments suggest some of Addams’ more sinister gags could be a reference point. Gags like the sight of Morticia Addams coming into the basement and calling for her daughter, but we see only Pugsley working with wet cement before a newly finished wall and burning candle (an obliquely funny nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”). Or there’s the time both of Addams’ much younger children frantically work to build a roaring blaze in the fireplace because, as Gomez smiles, “The little dears. They still believe in Santa Claus.”
While we doubt Santa or Amontillado wine will be appearing directly in Wednesday season 2, it sounds like Ortega is looking toward a similar vintage.
Wednesday season 2 is expected to premiere later this year on Netflix.
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