Wednesday

I’m a little late to the party but I’m currently obsessing over “Wednesday” like everyone else. The show is fun, slightly addicting, and sure to become a cult classic. If you haven’t had a chance to watch, trust me try it. Here’s some fun trivia about the show…

• Not only did Jenna Ortega learn to play the cello, she took fencing, archery, canoeing, German, and boxing lessons to prep for her role.
• The series was shot in Romania.
• The Weathervane, the name of the coffee shop in the series, shares its name with the Westfield High School student literary magazine, where Charles Addams the creator of the Addams Family first started working as an art editor and published his cartoons.

• Wednesday very rarely blinks. She only seems to blink when she is injured or caught off guard. The idea came after trying one take where Jenna Ortega didn’t blink”, leaving director Tim Burton “so enamoured with the result he told Jenna Ortega not to blink anymore when playing Wednesday. So she didn’t”. Then, during her appearance on TODAY, Ortega said: “She doesn’t blink. [Tim Burton] likes it when I tilt my chin down and look through my eyebrows, kind of like a Kubrick stare, and then I relax all the muscles in my face.” Ortega did express that she “got kinda annoying about it on set”, and that they “would have to restart a take if I started blinking], because sometimes you start crying.” “[It was] Romanian winter, there was all this wind in my face,” she concluded. “I learned to blink on other people’s lines.”
• Gomez Addams has generally been portrayed in live-action as a suave, handsome character: John Astin in The Addams Family (1964); Raul Julia in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993); Tim Curry in Addams Family Reunion (1998); and Glenn Taranto in The New Addams Family (1998). Tim Burton wanted his appearance in the show to specifically resemble the Charles Addams depiction, where he was drawn as fat and porcine.
• The code to the entrance of the secret “Nightshades Society” is a double snap, the same type of snap that was used in the Addams Family Theme song on the original show and movies.
• Wednesday lives in Ophelia Hall at Nevermore Academy. Ophelia was the name of Morticia’s sister on the original Addams Family TV series.

• In Puritan or “Pilgrim” society, “Goody” was not a name, but rather a form of address for an adult woman of lower class. Goodman would be the male equivalent.
• Set a record for Netflix viewings figures with 341 million hours watched (over 50 million households) in the first week of release (November 2022), taking it to the Top One spot in many countries, surpassing the fourth season of Stranger Things (335 million hours)
• Christina Ricci (Mrs Thornhill) had previously starred as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993).
• Nevermore Academy is named after the Edgar Allan Poe poem “The Raven”, where the bird continually quotes “Nevermore.”

• The typewriter seen in the title sequence uses a QWERTY keyboard layout. The typewrite Wednesday uses herself has a QWERTZ (German) layout.
• Became top #1 on Netflix with over 341,000,000 hours streamed after just one week.
• The series marks Christina Ricci‘s second collaboration with Tim Burton after working with him on Sleepy Hollow (1999).
• Catherine Zeta-Jones being 53 is the oldest actress to play Morticia in a live action version.
• This is composer Danny Elfman‘s sixteenth comic-book feature: he worked on the Tim Burton films Batman (1989) and its sequel Batman Returns (1992), Dick Tracy (1990), the Men in Black trilogy, the Sam Raimi films Spider-Man (2002) and Spider-Man 2 (2004), Hulk (2003), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Justice League (2017) and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).
• The title to every episode in season one contains the word “woe”.
• Jenna Ortega performed the wild dance set to The Cramps’ 1981 single “Goo Goo Muck.” while battling COVID-19. “I’d gotten the song about a week before and I just pulled from whatever I could it’s crazy because it was my first day with COVID so it was awful to film,” Ortega revealed during a recent NME interview. “Yeah, I woke up and it’s weird, I never get sick and when I do it’s not very bad, I had the body aches. I felt like I’d been hit by a car and that a little goblin had been let loose in my throat and was scratching the walls of my esophagus,” Ortega continued. “They were giving me medicine between takes because we were waiting on the positive result.” MGM, stressed to NME that “strict COVID protocols were followed and once the positive test was confirmed the production removed Jenna from set.” “I asked to redo it but we didn’t have time,” Ortega added. “I think I probably could have done it a bit better.” Ortega choreographed the dance scene herself. The actor’s COVID revelation has led many viewers to criticize the production for allowing Ortega on set when she was showing COVID symptoms, even if she didn’t have a positive COVID test at the time. Even with COVID, Ortega delivered a memorable dance that has become the talk of social media. The dance scene has gone so viral that “Goo Goo Muck” by The Cramps has increased its Spotify streams by 9.5% since “Wednesday” debuted. Pairing Ortega’s “Wednesday” dance moves with Lady Gaga’s song “Bloody Mary” has also become a viral TikTok meme, boosting that song’s Spotify streams by more than 1,800% compared to the previous month.
• Colleen Atwood, the Oscar-winning costume designer, pulled together a medley of creepy, kooky, mysterious, spooky and all-together ooky ensembles for the show “With Wednesday, we can nail the iconic look right away with a nod to the original pointed collar, little print dress and modernized platform shoes, and then put her in an environment that she totally contrasts with: an American happy-time public school,” Atwood tells Variety of her reverence for the macabre teen’s original outfit. “Then you’ve given the nod to all that’s come before.” “When we move to the other world of Nevermore, Wednesday’s in a uniform that’s specially made because she is allergic to color,” she adds. “I wanted a gray and black stripe, but I didn’t really like how they looked in the world. So I ended up having the stripes drawn and painted. We silkscreened all her stripes, so we got something that was a softer variation on a on a stripe, which is a fun process as a designer to be able to do.” Wednesday’s fashion couldn’t be any more different from her roommate, a bubbly blonde with an affinity for rainbow colors. “Enid’s (Emma Myers) the epitome of everything Wednesday hates: girly color, full of chatter,” Atwood says. “We had so much fun playing off that with Enid. With the hard graphics of Wednesday’s things, Enid’s palette with the orange and the pink and the yellow were like a sunny contrast to her, which helped make them both look more different from each other as characters.”