The first season of Netflix’s Wednesday, an updated take on the iconic The Addams Family comic book turned media franchise, might have focused on the daughter, Wednesday Addams, played by Jenna Ortega (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), but her quirky family was never too far away.
And now that audiences have embraced her bizarre but adorable, gothic interpretation (the 2022 supernatural series drew a hair-raising 341.2 million hours viewed in its first week, marking a new record for the streamer then) created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (the duo behind TV’s Smallville), the team is now ready to bring her extended family into deeper focus, even as the series continues to chart the exploits of the psychic teen in her second year at Nevermore.
For series director Tim Burton (Batman, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), who directed half of the first season’s eight episodes and will do the same for the upcoming second season, the connective tissue of family has always been essential to the franchise and it’s something he will continue to explore, alongside his signature brand of gothic horror and dark fantasy, which are eerily similar to Charles Addams’ creation.
“They’re larger than life characters, but inside, it’s like families. I don’t know one family that’s not weird,” he quipped during the recent press conference that Geek Culture attended.
Against a spooky graveyard backdrop with gothic motifs, the cast and creative team, which includes Luis Guzmán (Gomez Addams), Catherine Zeta-Jones (Morticia Addams), Ortega, Fred Armisen (Uncle Fester), Joanna Lumley (Hester Frump), Steve Buscemi (Barry Dort), creators and showrunners, Gough and Millar, as well as producer and director Burton, were all decked out in shades of black and happily reassembled for the event, filling it with terms of endearment and inside jokes, making the session feel a lot less like a press rollout, and more like a family gathering at a Sunday barbecue.
And that’s precisely the point, as since the razor-sharp focus on its titular heroine and her adjustment in school as a lone wolf is done, it’s clear that Season 2 taps into something more resonant and restless than just a teenage revenge plot or a supernatural mystery. It embraces not just the aesthetic of the Addams family, but its emotional DNA and is about the legacy Wednesday comes from, the family she can’t quite escape, and the strange, sometimes sinister ways we learn how to love, and nothing is quite as apt as the cast that brought their own bonds to life onscreen, reviving the fan-favourite oddball, macabre, but ultimately, deeply loving family.
With this in mind, Gough and Millar took the opportunity to deepen the emotional spine of the show, by adjusting the roles of her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez, A Wrinkle in Time) and Uncle Fester (Armisen, The Dictator) beyond mere cameos, and even introducing the character of Hester aka Grandmama Frump, Wednesday’s maternal grandmother played by Lumley (The Wolf of Wall Street).
“It’s thrilling to get to be able to really explore the Addams Family,” says Gough, “To be able to explore the family dynamic in this show and see how they relate, because even a family that loves each other can still have family issues and family drama, that’s been a lot of fun.”
“We were just thrilled that Miles and Al incorporated the family into Season 2. You know, they dangled the carrot for us in Season 1,” quips Zeta-Jones, who returns as the Addams family matriarch, Morticia, “But it was wonderful in Season 2 to be able to explore that, for us to be within Wednesday’s world.”
“Even though [Wednesday] didn’t want us to be there. But we planted ourselves there within the school grounds,” she jokes with a smile.
But just as Wednesday is not a fan of her mother inserting herself into the young child’s life, Morticia will not be too thrilled with her mother showing up either, as the introduction of Hester, mother to Morticia, is one that promises to shake things up in the Addams family. This Hester is also decidedly different from previous incarnations, such that Lumley calls her a “ghastly” person, adding that the only character that Hester is fond of is her granddaughter.
“She’s fond of Wednesday because she can see in her the kind of spirit and streak of bad in her – danger, daring, everything that she doesn’t see in Morticia,” notes Lumley, adding with a laugh, “She’s grand, she’s vain, she’s greedy, and she sees in Wednesday, a shining light.”
And knowing the strong-willed independence of the fiercely loyal matriarch in the family, Hester’s presence and attitude aren’t likely to jive well with the family dynamics set out by Morticia, who has her own parenting style.
Zeta-Jones herself highlights, “But the dynamic of my mother, too, that gives me another element of parenting, how she wants to be a different mother to Wednesday than Hester was to me.” And that will have an impact on Wednesday as well, she reasons, noting that the two characters’ mother-daughter dynamic is one that “is unique to Wednesday and Morticia in that there’s such a deep sense of love.”
And this was by design, explains Millar, who wants to explore the multi-generational dynamics of mothers and daughters this season. “Seeing the three generations of Addams women together was [something] we thought would be very interesting.”
So if grandmother, mother and daughter are in focus, where does that leave the men in the family? Their presence is still present in the series, even if it’s not front and center, says Luis Guzmán (Code Black, Havoc), who returns as the father, Gomez, in what he also describes as a larger paternal role in the series, “I love being a father, a real father, and adapting that to this Gomez character. Because he really does care about his daughter, his son, his wife, sometimes even Thing.”
Then there is the unique father-son relationship that Guzmán and Ordonez are also building on. “On my end, Gomez and Pugsley, just being able to really gel together, [and me being] the worst and best role model for my son, I’m really proud of that.”
Clearly, this is a cast that has invested emotions, time and passion into building the familial bonds inside and outside of the show, and it carries in the way that they speak lovingly of each other and admiringly of the series.
Explaining that his approach to his character was to channel a “real, organic and honest” feeling that stemmed from his own fatherhood, Guzmán declares, “It’s just that pure dynamic that comes to me organically, I care… The pureness of how I’m able to portray and send out that love is so important to me.”
With Pugsley’s increased presence both in the show and in Nevermore Academy, the school for outcasts, Wednesday will have to deal with her brother on top of the challenges that the new school year will pose.
While Ordonez was not present at the conference, Millar says audiences will likely have a newfound love for him this time around.
“[Viewers have] never seen Pugsley actually as a real dimensional character before; he’s always sort of like a character that’s never been explored. So, to see him in school in his own adventures, and he gets into a lot of trouble, that [will] also [be] really fun.”
Zeta-Jones quickly encapsulated the dynamics between the siblings, adding that Pugsley is a “very nuanced character”, especially in relation to the morbidly terrifying Wednesday, saying that it would certainly be a “really tough” time being the titular character’s brother.
If anything, audiences would walk away from this series knowing that Morticia and Gomez are no longer just framed photos on the wall, and unmoving reminders of equally stiff parental figures. Grandmama Hester is no longer just a caricature of a fierce grand matriarch, arriving with claws bared. And Wednesday, for all of her thorny wit, begins to blossom as a character; connecting, not by softening, but by stepping into the chaos of kinship.
The season will continue to chart her growth, both physically and emotionally, as she grows to love her family in different ways, while embracing her newfound close friend Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers, A Minecraft Movie) as part of that wonderfully weird family unit.
Ortega, who is also pulling double duty as an executive producer this season, acknowledged the shift in her character’s emotional range, particularly in how she interacts with her family and Enid’s budding role in it.
“Wednesday isn’t very vulnerable in general, just because she’s usually the smartest in the room, but she never denies her love or ‘hate’, and passion for her family and Enid just naturally sort of becomes that,” said Ortega.
She then goes on to make it clear that even though Wednesday is guarded, her affections are always clear, remarking that, “It’s nice, because people don’t tend to question Wednesday anyway, so she doesn’t really have to talk about it, she just does it.”
Lumley perhaps put it best, “The work that [all of us] do, is that you are in love with people, intensely, like family… The first thing you have to do is when you arrive in a new family is to love them intensely from the second you start, and to trust them implicitly. And that’s made much easier by everything that’s been done on this show.”
Wednesday Season 2 Part 1 will premiere on 6 August 2025, with Part 2 following on 3 September 2025.
Conversation with Ting Wei is like chatting with a weird AI bot programmed only with One Piece lore and theories, sitcom quotes and other miscellaneous pop culture references. When he’s not sleeping, he’s highly likely reading manga. In fact, the only thing he reads more than manga is the Bible, and it’s honestly pretty close.
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