Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Part 1 of Wednesday season 2.
Wednesday Addams has always dreamed of looking death in the face — and sometimes, dreams come true.
Part 1 of Wednesday‘s second season ended with everyone’s favorite somber teenager (played by Jenna Ortega) thrown out of a second story window by none other than the Hyde. As she lies unconscious on the ground, her voiceover declares that she’s made everything “much worse.” It’s the kind of cliffhanger that creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar hope will cause fans to tune in when Part 2 drops on Netflix on Sept. 3 — and one they hope makes up for the nearly three-year wait between seasons of the Addams family drama. (Like many, they had to contend with the SAG and WGA strikes, not to mention the busy schedule of their leading misanthrope.)
That’s why season 2 wastes no time putting Wednesday in the middle of a new mystery, this one focused on a slew of bird killings around town. And unlike in season 1, fans know who’s behind them by the end of episode 4, which rounds out Part 1.
“We didn’t want to repeat ourselves, as second seasons are tricky things with a lot of shows, and we wanted to change up the mystery storytelling,” Gough tells Entertainment Weekly. “So the idea is that at the end of episode 4, literally all hell breaks loose. It propels you forward, but I don’t think you quite know where it’s going.”
What we do know is that Willow Hill had a secret program called LOIS — Long-term Outcast Integration Study — where they tried to extract abilities from their outcasts and inject them into normal humans. The experiment worked on Augustus Stonehearst’s daughter (Heather Matarazzo), who is now the Avian that Wednesday has been searching for. And when “all hell breaks loose” at the psychiatric hospital, so does the Hyde, after Tyler (Hunter Doohan) spent the season in chains.
“They don’t really cover turning into a monster in acting school,” Doohan jokes. “I remember [director] Tim Burton was like, ‘Hunter, you get angry and do your interpretive dance or whatever.'”
That interpretive dance leads to the Hyde killing his master, Thornhill (Christina Ricci), before charging Wednesday and launching her out of a window.
“I just go around killing icons in episode 4,” Doohan says with a laugh.
Noah B. Taylor as Bruno, Emma Myers as Enid, Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, Georgie Farmer as Ajax, and Joy Sunday as Bianca on ‘Wednesday’.
Netflix
It’s a night shoot that Ortega, who’s also a producer this season, remembers well.
“It’s the first time, at least in the season, where Wednesday truly is out of her depth,” she says. “They were talking about me running down the hall or me doing some sort of slide underneath [the Hyde], and I remember telling them, ‘I don’t think so, because this isn’t an action show. And Wednesday’s too smart for that. She has to understand that there’s no chance. She could run, but it’s a huge monster.’ So, I started saying that, and then it kind of piggybacked into Tim’s idea of it just being this really, really quiet silence, which stands out from the rest of the episode.”
That silence is followed by Wednesday crashing through the window to… her death?
“It felt very poetic and dramatic and surprising,” director Tim Burton says of the decision not to show the Hyde physically throw her.
Ortega adds, “We don’t need to see everything. Sometimes it’s better to leave it to the audience’s imagination.”
But if history is any indication, dying leads to good things on this show. After all, being dead was how Jenna Ortega first landed the role.
“I had been dead all night,” the actress recalls of her audition, which took place while she filmed the horror movie X. “I got shot in the head, and I was wearing a prosthetic. So I had glycerin and grease in my hair from them trying to remove the prosthetic. I looked like I hadn’t washed my hair in years, and I had a big cut on my face.”
Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley and Luis Guzmán as Gomez on ‘Wednesday’.
Helen Sloan/Netflix
Obviously, she got the part, but it wasn’t the first time Ortega had crossed paths with the deliciously dour teen. She actually read to play Wednesday in an animated film when she was 13 or 14.
“I recorded it on the set of a show that I was working on at the time,” she says. “I went to the closet and I asked my mom to stand outside to make sure that there weren’t people walking by, and I remember leaving this broom closet and telling my mom, ‘I don’t know what they’re looking for, but I would like to play her one day. That would be cool.'”
Years later, she was destined to wear the pigtail braids and deadly stare that audiences had come to expect. For Gough and Millar, finding Ortega was the answer to a four-month worldwide search for the titular teenage sleuth — and furthermore, the answer to years of developing the series.
The writing duo, best known for Smallville, first had the idea for the show in 2018. Pulling from that Smallville chapter of their careers, they had been pondering, “Is there a character where we can tell the untold chapter of their life,” Gough says.
Although creating the show would face a few development hurdles, Gough and Millar knew they were onto something special when Burton agreed to direct.
“Tim was always our first choice to do it,” Gough says. “He said people had approached him about [the Addams family], but it always felt cartoony, and this one felt grounded. He hadn’t done TV before, but he was very interested in exploring that kind of longform storytelling.”
Burton admits he was probably a bit more of a Munsters fan than an Addams Family devotee growing up, but he had long admired Charles Addams’ drawings.
“I always appreciated the humor and the nature of his cartoons,” Burton says. “I had a crush on Wednesday growing up. She was my kind of person. And when I read what Al and Miles did, I shared her worldview about school and parents and therapy and society. And so that’s really what hooked me.”
The duo still remember the FaceTime call with Burton at his country estate as they discussed their idea to follow a teenage Wednesday to school.
“He has these, I think 20 life-sized dinosaurs that roam the grounds of his country house,” Millar says, of course referencing statues and not actual giant reptiles… we think. “So he was out there under the shadow of a dinosaur talking to us about Wednesday Addams.”
Clearly, it was a match made in hell. With Burton on board, an all-star cast wasn’t far behind.
“We joke that we got all of our first choices because that’s the nice thing about having Tim,” Gough says.
Tim Burton directs Luis Guzmán, Jenna Ortega, and Catherine Zeta-Jones behind the scenes of ‘Wednesday’.
Helen Sloan/Netflix
Luis Guzmán and Catherine Zeta-Jones quickly signed up to play Gomez and Morticia. So quickly, in fact, Guzmán says that once he hung up with Burton, he had to call his team back and clarify, “What project was he talking about?”
Similarly, Zeta-Jones says, “I didn’t even read the script. It was just the idea of playing Morticia Addams through Tim Burton’s mind. I just said, ‘When do you want me to get on a plane?'”
That plane took the cast to Romania, one of very few places they were able to find an affordable (and available) filming location in 2021. But it turned out to be the perfect home for Nevermore Academy, the school Wednesday would attend (and where she’d promptly start to hunt down a monster, as a teen does).
“It actually proved to be an incredible location for us, in terms of the aesthetic,” Millar says. “The studio was completely abandoned and deserted. We had packs of wild dogs roaming the stages, and we had our own haunted woods next door to the studio.”
It was there that the producers had to figure out one final piece of casting: Thing.
“That was a fun audition,” Millar says. “We wanted to hire a local Romanian, so we sent out a casting call to violinists, cellists, pianists and magicians — anyone whose fingers were dexterous. Some of the hands were too thick and the fingers were too stubby, and then some were too thin and the fingers were too long.”
Ultimately, magician Victor Dorobantu was the hand for the job, bringing to life the iconic character who, as Gough explains, has to perform “the ultimate charades” given that they quickly realized that “you need two hands to do ASL.”
Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia on ‘Wednesday’.
Helen Sloan/Netflix
With Thing in place, the team was able to embark on filming season 1, though nothing could’ve prepared them for how the show would be received. When Wednesday dropped on Netflix in November 2022, it took the internet by storm — and not just because of that amazing dance sequence.
“When I got 10 million followers in two weeks, I was like ‘Oh my God. That doesn’t happen,'” says Emma Myers, who plays Wednesday’s color-loving bestie, Enid. “My life changed overnight.”
Season 1 holds the record for Netflix’s most popular English-language show of all time, with 252.1 million views in its first 91 days, spending 20 weeks on the Global Top 10. Through June of this year, the show had more than 350 million views and reached No. 1 in 90 countries.
“When I go to the supermarket, I’ve got like little 8, 9, 10-year-olds following me around, and you hear the loudspeaker say, ‘Your mom is looking for you,'” Guzmán says. “There’s not a rock big enough for me to hide under.”
It’s a feeling that Wednesday herself understands in season 2. Returning to school after successfully capturing the Hyde, she’s nothing short of a hero, prepared to loathe every moment of her newfound fame.
“She doesn’t like it, which I get,” Burton says. “When I can relate to something, it’s easier for me. It makes it more cathartic.”
As production moved from Romania to Ireland — and out of the COVID restrictions — the cast says season 2 was filled with more fun (and more pints). But when it comes to exciting episodes, they all point to Part 2. Hoohan, for one, is ready to explore what the Hyde looks like without a master (and those pesky chains).
“He’s free,” he says. “He’s out in the world again. It’s gonna be so fun.”
Then there’s the matter of Enid’s safety. After all, Wednesday’s visions have all centered around the death of her bubbly bestie.
“I got the first episode a few months before we started shooting, and I got to the end and I was like, ‘Um, nobody talked to me about this,'” Myers says with a laugh. “I remember writing my team an email being like, ‘I think I might die, just a heads up.'”
And as Millar puts it, “You should still be very worried for Enid.”
Emma Myers as Enid on ‘Wednesday’.
Bernard Walsh/Netflix
Gough adds, “Now you’ve let out Tyler, and he’s very plainly stated what he wants to do. So I think that’s something else that then needs to be dealt with. And then who is he without a master? He’s the ultimate wild card, and Wednesday is responsible for that. It’ll all have ramifications.”
With four episodes left — and a super secret Lady Gaga role still to come — there’s plenty of drama for Part 2.
“All of my favorite episodes are in the back half of the season,” Myers says. “I’m so excited for people to watch. They’re gonna die.”
Speaking of death, there is still the small matter of Wednesday bleeding on the ground at the end of Part 1.
“Well, the show’s called Wednesday, so that’s the biggest clue we’ll give,” Millar says.
Perhaps Wednesday’s dream of facing death will have to wait.
