‘Wednesday' Creators On How Addams Family's Story Expands In Season 2

Forbes

a day ago

When it came to mapping out ideas for director Tim Burton and Jenna Ortega and her fellow cast members for Wednesday Season 2, series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar didn't give a thought to Netflix sensation's monumental record viewership.
The reason for that is simple. Before they started filming Season 1 with director and executive producer Burton, Gough and Millar already conceived the story for Season 2 — yet left enough room for adjustments after re-examining the events of the initial season played out for audiences.
'We always have signposts when we come to a new project, especially a television show,' Gough, sitting alongside Millar, said in a recent Zoom conversation. 'You want to make sure there's enough there that you can tell multiple seasons of the story, but you also don't want to be so set in stone because ideas evolve.'
Arriving on Netflix on Wednesday, appropriately, Wednesday Season 2 finds Ortega's Wednesday Addams and her trusty (disembodied) right-hand man, Thing, returning to Nevermore Academy for another year of studies, as well as another set of mysterious murders to investigate.
The big difference for Season 2, however, is that the rest of the Addams Family — Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), Gomez (Luis Guzmán), Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) and their butler, Lurch (Joonas Suotamo) — aren't just dropping Wednesday off for her sophomore year at Nevermore — they've been invited to stay for a while by the academy's new principal, Barry Dort (Steve Buscemi).
'We definitely wanted to bring in more of the Addams Family for Season 2 and expand the stories for the other characters,' Gough said. 'Season 1 was 95% Wednesday because of budget constraints and we couldn't tell the stories of these other characters outside of Wednesday. So I think for us, the success of the show gave us the ability to really expand the world of those characters and bring in the Addams Family.'
Of the characters' stories Gough and Millar were most excited to tell in Wednesday Season 2, Gough said he couldn't wait to delve into the complicated dynamic between Morticia and Wednesday. On top of that, Gough wanted to examine Morticia's complicated dynamic with her mother, Hester Frump (Joanne Lumley), aka Grandmama, who is introduced in Season 2.
'I wanted to focus on Morticia more and to see the two forces — one, the daughter, and one, the mother — and how Morticia is caught in between,' Gough said. 'She is very formidable. As Miles has said, I think Wednesday underestimates her mother and I think Hester underestimates Morticia as well. With Morticia, there's a quiet confidence and a calmness to her and she stands up to her mother at one point.'
Millar, on the other hand, couldn't wait to expand Pugsley's story.
'Pugsley's the character that's been ignored through every iteration of the Addams Family, in the sitcom and the movies,' Millar observed. 'I think that gave us a broad campus to paint our own version and I think we lucked out with Isaac [Ordonez], who plays the role. He grew up and hit puberty [since Season 1], so he came back to production and he has great wonder and mystic in his eyes.'
Millar is especially excited about a scene with Pugsley at the end of Episode 1, which, for the sake of not divulging spoiler details, won't be revealed here.
'It was the perfect Pugsley Addams moment and I think it really encapsulated what we want that character to be and what the audiences will fall in love with,' Millar enthused.
'Wednesday' Is Not The First Time Alfred Gough And Miles Millar Have Taken On A Beloved Entity
As creative collaborators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have a storied history in films and television that dates back to 1996, when the pair wrote the first of two episodes they penned for the sci-fi series Bugs in the U.K.
Since that point, Gough and Millar have written the screen stories for such hits as Mel Gibson and Danny Glover's Lethal Weapon 4 and Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man 2. In addition, the creatives wrote screenplays for several notable films including Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson's Shanghai Noon and its sequel Shanghai Knights, Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro's Showtime, Brendan Fraser's The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and Lindsay Lohan and Michael Keaton's Herbie: Fully Loaded.
On television, the duo created the 2011 version of TV's Charlie's Angels, as well as the adventure series The Shanara Chronicle and Into the Badlands.
While Gough and Millar have had the opportunity to craft original creations, they certainly have had their fair share of contributing new ideas to pre-established entities apart from Wednesday.
In 2001, Gough and Millar created the Superman prequel series Smallville starring Tom Welling as Clark Kent, which ran 10 seasons through 2017. Then, in 2022, they collaborated with Tim Burton on Wednesday and subsequently wrote the screenplay to 2024's long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which of course features the original film's stars Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara, and introduces Jenna Ortega to the Deetz family.
Not surprisingly, Gough and Millar said that their new takes on Superman, The Addams Family and Beetlejuice have been among their most challenging projects.
'When we did Smallville, there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe [or DC Universe]. There were no walls around these big properties,' Gough said, while Millar added, 'The idea of telling stories in canon wasn't there. We had the freedom to do whatever we wanted.
'Obviously, we're always very respectful of anything we do with an established property, and try to capture the essence of what it is,' Millar further noted. 'But the idea of doing our version of Smallville or the Clark Kent origin story would be impossible today. We would never be allowed to do what we did with Smallville. It would be unheard of. We would be defiling canon? It would be sacrilege.'
Whether Smallville followed canon or not, Gough and Millar are thrilled that the series spoke to a particular group of people involved in the latest iteration of Superman.
'We say, one generation's heresy is the next generation's gospel, so it's nice now when you hear the actors in the new Superman movie say that Smallville was their first introduction to Superman or their first Lex Luthor,' Gough said smiling. 'It's great.'
As for Wednesday's challenges, the duo said they also needed to, like Superman, honor the origin of the property, which isn't as well-known as the original Addams Family TV series in the 1960s and the movies in the early 1990s. Also like Superman, the tales of The Addams Family began on paper — with the latter being Charles Addams' cartoon strips in The New Yorker magazine in 1938.
'Everybody loves The Addams Family, but you don't really know much about them. They didn't have names [until the 1940s] and then you had the series in the 1960s and movies in the 90s,' Gough said. 'It's been a great canvas to tell this untold chapter of Wednesday's life, but also to explore The Addams Family and all of those family dynamics.'
While both Wednesday and Smallville came with their degrees of difficulty, Gough and Millar at least had the luxury of time to spread their stories out in an episodic format on television.
The story of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, on the flip side, had to be much more compact and as such, provided Gough and Millar the biggest challenge yet from a storytelling standpoint.
'I think Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was probably in some ways the toughest to do because it's a movie and you only have so much space to tell it,' Gough said. 'Plus, we wanted to honor what people love but also give the movie a reason to be in the present day. [We asked ourselves,] 'Why are we telling this story now, 35, 36 years later?''
'It couldn't feel like a cynical money grab,' Millar added. '[We didn't want people to think,] 'They're going to do it because it's a sequel to make money.' There had to be a reason to make the movie, and that was something that we talked to Tim about as well. It had to have heart and soul and hopefully it did and was something that resonated because of the nostalgia of the original iconic movie. We hope the new movie had something to add.'
Also starring Emma Myers, Joy Sunday, Hunter Doohan, Noah B. Taylor, Evie Templeton, Georgie Farmer, Moosa Mostafa, Billie Piper, Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo and Victor Dorobantu as Thing, Wednesday Season 2, Part 1 premieres on Netflix on Wednesday with Episodes 1-4.
Wednesday Season 2 will return with Part 2 and Episodes 5-8 on Wednesday, Sept. 3.
Note: Some of the quotes for the 'Wednesday' Season 2 were condensed or edited for clarity.