Jenna Ortega is the protagonist Wednesday The Netflix series is based on Charles Addams cartoons. Ortega follows in the footsteps of Christina Ricci who portrayed the character in 1991’s The Addams family The 1993 sequel Families Values of Addams.
Ricci returned to the Netflix reboot with the character of Marylin Thornhill and although she shared scenes with Ortega, the new Wednesday said she didn’t ask for any advice.
“No, I think when she was on set, neither one of us said Wednesday wants to each other,” Ortega spoke in an interview one-on-one with Emma Myers, her costar. MTV News. “I don’t think she wanted to get in the way of my performance and feel like she was overbearing. And then I felt like I didn’t want to pull up something that she did 30 years ago, for one, the sake of my own benefit, but two, I didn’t want to rip her off. And I didn’t want to be too much like her.”
Ortega claimed that Wednesday is completely different from the 90’s movies that Barry Sonnenfeld directed.
“Our show has superpowers and outcasts and evil ghost pilgrims,” She added. “So they’re two very different people our Wednesdays, I think. Our characters in the show are polar opposites. They have a sweet little relationship.”
Ortega also told Myers in the same interview that she “felt a lot of pressure to do it right” Because Wednesday is “such a beloved character.”
“I’ve never played someone who’s been done before. So I think that that was a really interesting thing for me,” She said. “I have a lot of respect for the character, we’ve never spent as much time with Wednesday on camera before, I think there’s gonna be some more depth or some more emotional range that we haven’t really seen from her before.”
The video below shows the entire interview between Ortega & Myers. AVOID SPOILERS.