Snap to it: There’s a new Wednesday trailer for you to see, and it’s a real Addams Family affair.
The new footage, which debuted Saturday during the series’ panel at New York Comic Con, reveals the show’s first look at Uncle Fester — who will be played by comedy vet Fred Armisen. Check out the trailer above and watch the full NYCC panel below.
Armisen makes his debut with a spark, which is fitting given the character’s penchant for electricity in previous incarnations. He initially appears as a mystery man who crosses paths with Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) in the woods, before zapping a weapon out of her grasp and revealing himself in all his bald, sunken-eyed glory. Once she knows who it is, she’s delighted. The pair throw on matching floppy-eared helmets and drive off on his dalmatian-printed motorbike, which definitely isn’t as “incognito” as Fester thinks it is.
Family reunions aside, the trailer also revealed new glimpses of 16-year-old Wednesday Addams as she’s sent off to Nevermore Academy, a boarding school with a very unique student body that’s also the place her parents first met. While there, she’ll have to navigate interactions with fellow classmates, master her growing psychic abilities and delve into a tantalizing murder mystery. Oh, and she’ll get a helping hand — literally — from Thing, the disembodied appendage sent by her parents to keep tabs (fingers?) on her while she’s at school.
Starring alongside Ortega and Armisen are Gwendoline Christie, Christina Ricci, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán, Emma Myers and Hunter Doohan. Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar serve as showrunners, and Tim Burton himself stepped behind the camera for several episodes.
Check out the trailer above, and read on for some of the creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky things we learned at the Comic Con panel.
1. Jenna Ortega relished the chance to play a version of Wednesday Addams we’ve never seen before.
The Addams family is known to generations, from the classic New Yorker cartoons to the ‘60s TV series and more recent film adaptations, but we’ve really only seen Wednesday as a young girl with a penchant for pigtail braids, black clothes, and the macabre. On Wednesday, viewers will get to know a 16-year-old version of the character, still retaining those iconic characteristics but now more grown up — at the center of the story. Exploring this new incarnation of Wednesday was exciting for everyone involved, including Ortega.
“We’ve never seen her as a teenager, which is a cool little endeavor,” said Ortega. “And also, I can't think of many iconic characters — or characters that have reached as wide of an audience as Wednesday — who are also Latin. So anytime that you have that sort of opportunity it's a great honor, and it's something that I jumped on.”
And even if, to borrow from another beloved Tim Burton project, Wednesday is somewhat strange and unusual, she still goes through many universal teen experiences — navigating a new school, figuring out who she is within and outside her family — though in a decidedly Wednesday kind of way.
“A character like Wednesday who has always been so bold and so confident in herself, for her to be thrown into an environment like Nevermore where [her parents] Morticia and Gomez reigned, they had their education there and created quite the legacy, it's really frustrating or obnoxious to be stuck in the shadow of that sort of thing,” Ortega added. “[She’s] never been thrown into a situation full of outcasts. It's interesting — she's still an outcast, in a sea of outcasts.”
Luis Guzmán, who plays patriarch Gomez Addams, echoed that the series showcases the beloved family in a new way. “It’s a continuation of the legacy that is The Addams Family and these characters, but you’re going to see them in a different light, like you’ve never seen before.”
2. Fred Armisen actually shaved his head to play Uncle Fester.
That shiny cranium you saw in the trailer? All Armisen, who went full Fester (at least when it came to his hair) in order to play the classic character. “I wanted to do it right. I didn’t want to do a bald cap, so I shaved my head… and tonight I’m gonna do it again,” the actor joked.
Armisen told the crowd he wanted his version of Uncle Fester to have a similar vibe to the character from the Addams Family TV series. And maybe he’s a bit partial now that he’s played the part, but his most vivid memory of the original show is Fester with the light bulb in his mouth. Illuminating!
3. Everyone loved working with Tim Burton — and his frequent collaborators.
Everyone on Saturday’s panel effused about getting to work with Burton and remarked on what a great collaborator he was. (When Guzmán was told Burton wanted to talk with him, the actor’s response was, “You mean that guy from the Batman movies? Yeah, I want to talk to him too.”)
Gwendoline Christie, who plays Nevermore headmistress Larissa Weems, a new character created for Wednesday, said it was a surreal experience. “I’ve wanted to work with Tim Burton my entire life,” she said. “For there to be this filmmaker that created films about the outsider, someone I felt I could really connect to, that understood me. His work means so much to so many people.” The Sandman star is clearly one of them: she said she was bright red during her initial Zoom meeting with the filmmaker. “[Burton] sees you and he liberates you, and he is willing to collaborate with you,” she added. “And the beauty and freedom of that, I believe, is all over the screen in the show.”
Cast members also raved about Burton’s frequent collaborators, composer Danny Elfman and costume designer Colleen Atwood, who both worked on Wednesday. Armisen had a pinch-me moment mid-panel, after everyone got to watch a sneak peek from the show. “It just occurred to me watching the clip, to be doing something while [Elfman’s] score is underneath it, is just mind blowing.”
Atwood’s work, meanwhile, cast a spell on Ortega. “Tim's look isn't the same without her,” she said. “She's the kind of woman who will look at a coat, add three buttons and somehow it's 10 times better than it initially was. It's witchcraft!”
4. Smallville helped Al Gough and Miles Millar get a green light on Wednesday.
Cue up Remy Zero, because Gough and Millar’s beloved series about a teenage Clark Kent might have helped them bring Wednesday to the small screen.
The idea for the show came to the duo quickly: Wednesday Addams at boarding school. But then they had to track down who had the rights in order to try and get it off the ground. “We feel very lucky that we had the honor of making this happen,” Millar said.”People had approached before and they’d been denied, and for us I guess the legacy of Smallville helped in terms of finding a chapter of a character’s life that no one knows, and telling that story. Smallville was our first show, and this is a next iteration of that.”
Gough and Millar also talked about nailing the tonal tightrope the show walks — by their description, it’s a funny, spooky and emotional brew — and what it was like telling Wednesday’s story across an expanded television format.
“With this longform storytelling, you can delve into the family more,” said Gough. “You've only really seen [Wednesday] as a 10-year-old who has the snarky line at the end of the scene. And now to put her in the center, as Jenna said, it's how she's dealing with her parents and breaking away from them. And then when you go away to boarding school or you go away to college, it's a time when young people build a new kind of family. So it's still an Addams Family. It's just a bigger family.”
Per Millar, it was important to Burton that Wednesday wasn’t just a remake of other Addams Family stories. “It's really important that the show feels like the next iteration, like it's honoring the past while still making something different and new.” And of course, this has the benefits of telling it in a multi-episode format. Millar added, “It's really an eight-hour Tim Burton movie, which is what he wanted to do, and something that’s like the next chapter of the Addams Family.”
Wednesday will premiere Nov. 23 on Netflix. (And yes, that is a Wednesday.) Be sure to wear black for the occasion.
