‘Outlandish and weird': How Netflix star Jenna Ortega and Tim Burton bonded on the dark side
'I've never really done it before,' says the 66-year-old. 'That's true. But for me, it didn't seem any different than making a movie. I mean, we worked a little quicker, it was a little bit more juggling a lot more things … in terms of [a] different kind of structure, which I wasn't really used to at all.'
Burton was on a flying visit to Sydney with the cast and creators of Wednesday, The Addams Family spin-off that in 2022 became Netflix's most-watched English-language show of all time, with 252 million views. The series follows the family's teenage daughter as she tries to solve a murder mystery at her school, Nevermore Academy. In typical Burton style, and in keeping with Addams Family lore, it's creepy and kooky with a deeply black sense of humour.
'I wasn't really an Addams Family fan, per se, but the character Wednesday I really identified with,' he says. 'When I read it, I felt exactly her worldview, I felt same way about school, family, psychiatry, society. So for me, it was a character that, even though I'm a middle-aged man, I felt very much like Wednesday. '
So he's really a teenage girl at heart?
'Yeah, I'm completely reversing my age as I get older,' he says, laughing.
The show's 22-year-old star Jenna Ortega has developed a deeply creative bond with Burton – starring not only in two seasons of Wednesday, but also last year's Beetlejuice sequel. Burton is director renowned for keeping a close circle of actors he prefers to work with – Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Danny DeVito – and Ortega has now been welcomed into that family.
'As somebody who is coming into this job with a lot of anxiety and uncertainty, he's one of those people and presences in my life that can release that,' she says. 'He's been nothing but professional and inspiring and outlandish and weird and funny. It's like making something with your friends. Every day we show up and we rehearse, but he lets us figure out what we want to do, and he works around us, and then it's just jokes and hanging out.'
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