It's been a trend in Hollywood over the past decade to cast traditionally white characters with racially diverse actors. Many of the popular film and television franchises from Disney to Star Wars, from Marvel to DC, to even Star Trek have been casting their iconic characters with Black, Asian, Latine, Indigenous and even Pacific Islander Actors. One notable example of Latine casting of a traditionally white role is Snow White, who's been cast with Colombian-American actor Rachel Zegler for the live-action remake of the 1937 Disney classic. Two other examples are the casting of Guatemalan actor Oscar Isaac as Marc Spector in Moon Knight, and Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta as Namor in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Joining the list of major franchises being cast with Latine actors is The Addams Family, in which the iconic daughter of the macabre family, Wednesday Addams, is being spun off into her own Netflix series, Wednesday. At first, it seems as though the show is following the same Hollywood trend of casting a racially diverse actor in a white role, but in reality, this is the first time the character has been accurately cast. Apart from Jenna Ortega confirming she is portraying a Latine version of Wednesday Addams for the Netflix series, the character herself has actually been Latine since the 1960s.
The Origins of Wednesday Addams' Latine Ancestry
Prior to the Addams Family gracing the TV screens with their ghoulish presence in 1964, they first appeared in a cartoon strip by Charles Addams in The New Yorker in 1938. Originally nameless, the Addams Family members satirized the ideal American family in the early 20th century by inverting many of the stereotypes associated with wealth. Instead of being admired for their fortune, the Addams Family terrified others with their morbid interests and equally macabre lifestyle. Over the next two decades, The Addams Family grew in popularity and were eventually adapted for television by David Levy and Donald Saltzman, which aired on ABC from 1964 to 1966.
As part of developing the characters for television, Charles Addams helped come up with the names for the characters. The Addams Family matriarch got her name Morticia from the word "mortician" and Wednesday got hers from the popular nursery rhyme "Wednesday's child is full of woe." Pugsley was originally going to be called Pubert in reference to "puberty," but was considered too sexual a term for 1960s television. Uncle Fester's name was pretty self-explanatory, but the one member of the family who got a conventional name was the family patriarch. Unable to choose between Repelli and Gomez, Charles Addams allowed actor John Astin to choose the character's name, with the latter ultimately choosing Gomez -- a Spanish family name.
While Astin himself was white, his choice name for his character informed later depictions of Gomez Addams, including the casting. By the time the Addams Family got another live-action adaptation, it was for the 1991 film The Addams Family and its 1993 sequel Adams Family Values. To reflect his Spanish-speaking heritage, Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia was cast as Gomez Addams, effectively cementing him as a Latine character, which effectively made his two children biracial. Since Julia's portrayal, Gomez has been mostly cast with Latine actors, including Oscar Isaac for the 2019 and 2021 Addams Family animated films. Ironically, despite Gomez being Latine for nearly half of a century, it wasn't until the 2022 Wednesday series that the casting for his two children also matched their Latine heritage.
The Addams Family as Latine Enriches Their Otherness Theme
While discussing her version of Wednesday Addams in a Netflix featurette, Jenna Ortega shared how important it was for her as an actor of both Mexican and Puerto Rican descent to represent her character's Latine heritage. "Wednesday is technically a Latina character and that's never been represented," Ortega stated. "For me, any time that I have an opportunity to represent my community, I want that to be seen."
Ortega, of course, was not the only one with those thoughts. Wednesday creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar -- along with producer and director Tim Burton -- also made the decision to openly represent the character's Latine heritage. This was done primarily by casting Isaac Ordonez as her brother Pugsley and casting veteran actor Luis Guzmán as their father Gomez. Furthermore, Gough and Millar established the show's version of Wednesday as being of Mexican descent in a clip that depicts her telling her friends her family has an alter in the living from for "a year-long Día de los Muertos."
By explicitly confirming the Addams Family as Latine, this interestingly enriches their theme of being social outcasts who don't "quite fit in" with American society. One of the many experiences of being Latine in the United States is the constant reminder that members of this group belong to a different culture and live by a set of values that don't fully align with those of American society. As such, members of the Latine community are consistently othered by English-speaking Americans and experience both subtle and hostile racism and xenophobia. Whether or not those experiences are depicted in Netflix's Wednesday is yet to be seen. However, even if Wednesday's experiences don't center around her Mexican heritage, the theme of "otherness" and how that shapes her perception of the world is still relevant to the Latine experience.
Wednesday premieres Nov. 23 on Netflix.