In an episode of Deadline’s Crew Call podcast, Wednesday creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar disclosed their current work on a new animated Addams Family movie for Amazon MGM Studios.
The movie will be a complete reboot of the animated film franchise, having no links to the original films, as well as Netflix’s Wednesday, which stars Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Jenna Ortega as the deadpan, sarcastic, and macabre titular character.
Gough has told Crew Call that the creator duo would be working on the new animated film with Amazon MGM, as well as Kevin Miserocchi, the director of the Tee & Charles Addams Foundation, who personally knew Charles Addams, the creator of the Addams Family. Other collaborators on the project include producers Gail Berman (Elvis) and John Glickman (Rush Hour).
Gough and Millar shared about the first time they collaborated and how they have maintained that level of teamwork from their time at the USC Peter Stark Producing Program, working on their orangutan and cop buddy movie, Mango, all the way to their half-billion-grossing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024).
The pair also went on to talk about Season 2 of Wednesday, disclosing how they managed to successfully pull off the new season despite the writers’ and actors’ strikes, their inspiration, the enduring pull of the Addams Family franchise, and the best way to accurately depict what’s in Wednesday’s mind as she offhandedly tosses her usual sardonic one-liners.
As Gough explains, “The key with her is not writing a joke, it’s writing to her worldview. That’s where it lands, and that’s where it sounds fun. Anytime you reach for a joke with this character, you wind up cutting that line.”
In addition, because Wednesday isn’t exactly a typical detective, her motivations are usually different. In the words of Gough, Wednesday commits to solving crimes because “someone has gaslighted her, or because she feels a truth isn’t being told, she also sticks up for the underdog.” Unlike other characters who become more fleshed out as their show progresses, Gaugh said that the approach to Wednesday is to instead think of her as a character that is already “fully formed and she [just] has to learn that the world works in shades of grey.”
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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