Warning: This story contains spoilers from season 1 of Wednesday.
It’s always the ones you least suspect? After bringing Wednesday Addams to life as a child, Christina Ricci turned it up a notch with her shocking performance in Netflix’s Wednesday.
The actress previously got her breakout role playing the moody child in 1991’s The Addams Family and its sequel, Addams Family Values. Ricci later gushed about the influence that the experience had on her.
“Well, those movies have clearly had the biggest impact on my career and life,” she told the A.V. Club in June 2018. “I spent a lot of my childhood working on them and promoting them, and I’ve spent the rest of my life talking about them.”
The Yellowjackets star added: “So, both of the Addams Family movies, they’re huge in my history, and Wednesday, I feel very inextricably bound to her, because I feel, like, who can say how much influence being that person at that age for the amount of time that I was her, the amount of positive reinforcement from playing that character. It’s like a chicken-or-egg debate: Did I influence her as a character, or did she as a character influence my personality?”
Netflix later developed their own iteration, which explored the iconic character as a teenager at Nevermore Academy. The series, which premiered in November 2022, introduced Jenna Ortega in the role of Wednesday. Ricci, for her part, appeared in the first season as Ms. Marilyn Thornhill.
According to Ortega, the costars developed an understanding about their respective connection to Wednesday. “I did not pick her brain,” she shared during an interview with Entertainment Tonight that same month. “It was weird, it was like an unspoken agreement that we had. When we first locked eyes, we were just [thinking], ‘Let’s never talk about her.'”
The Scream star noted that it was “scary” to share scenes with the Sleepy Hollow actress, adding, “Because it’s like, she’s observing what it is, what you’re doing and it is one of her more popular characters and … she’s created quite the legacy to live up to. And the show is very reminiscent of her take. It just goes to show that there’s respect there.”
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The Golden Globe winner, however, found the experience “super fun” after filming the first season. “I was really excited to work with Tim [Burton] again,” Ricci exclusively told Us Weekly in October 2022. “Jenna is so amazing and so good in this part and was so great to work with. And so it was really lovely.”
Scroll down for a full breakdown of Ricci’s character in Netflix’s Wednesday:
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