Christina Ricci has witnessed firsthand Jenna Ortega’s take on Wednesday Addams. The actress, who previously portrayed Gomez and Morticia Addams’s firstborn, has a cameo on Netflix’s highly anticipated series Wednesday.
Ricci told HollywoodLife how she felt watching Jenna’s performance on the filming set. “It’s really exciting, and it’s really fun. From the moment I saw this sort of new interpretation of her look, I was like, oh my God, that’s so smart and so cool,” Christina told the outlet.
“And then to see her performance… it’s really great. It’s a really great, modern take on it. It feels more timely and appropriate. She has that sort of self-respect and dignity that really is at the core of Wednesday,” the star said. “All of her choices are so smart. I have so much respect for Jenna, and I think people are going to love her as Wednesday.”
Tim Burton and Netflix’s upcoming series will be released on Wednesday, November 23. The “Addams Family” spinoff will premiere all of its episodes on the same day. So if you love to binge-watch, you are in luck!
Although Wednesday is not a remake of any of the Addams Family movies or shows, co-showrunner Miles Millar said the series “it’s something that lives within the Venn diagram of what happened before, but it’s its own thing,” he said. “It’s not trying to be the movies or the ’60s TV show. That was very important to us and very important to Tim.”
“Wednesday is currently a teenager, and we’ve never seen her as a teenager before,” Ortega said in a statement. “Her snarky, snide remarks might not necessarily sound as charming when they’re coming from somebody who should probably know better than a 10-year-old girl. That was a balancing act.”
Jenna said the character has a lot of presence, and people will finally get to see all her sides. “We didn’t want to make her sound like every other teenage girl, but we also didn’t want to make her too ignorant. And we’ve never seen her on screen this much. Any other time you’ve seen Wednesday, she’s been the one-liner, the end of a joke, she always hits it, and I think that’s what people really love about her,” the star says. “But in this show, every scene is Wednesday. There’s an opportunity to give her a bit more dimension, and she becomes a bit more of a real person, which I don’t think we’ve ever seen before.”