At the heart of Netflix's Wednesday is the titular eldest daughter of the Addams Family, a comically gothic young woman who quickly disrupts the mystical high school she's forced to attend. Landing like a deadpan grenade in a monstrous take on the standard high school tropes and genre, Wednesday finds a particularly unique counter in Gwendoline Christie's Larissa Weems, who serves as the headmistress of the Nevermore Academy. Weems finds herself contending with Wednesday's perspective, as well as the mysteries and murders that seem to erupt with the young woman's presence at the supernatural school.
During a roundtable interview with members of the press, including CBR, ahead of Wednesday's Nov. 23 debut on Netflix, Gwendoline Christie explained her long-standing love for the gothic franchise. She dove into what excited her about Weems' unlikely connection with Wednesday Addams and how the Tim Burton collaboration was a dream come true.
Audiences have always loved The Addams Family, and that includes Gwendoline Christie, who revealed she grew up with the series as a major part of her childhood. "I really love the series on television, the black and white series. I really love the movies as well. The TV series... I think it just changed the entire way I thought about what television could be, the way in which families could be represented. It felt like there was so much more life and truth in that than in something that was more cookie-cutter. It certainly felt like a world where I could fit in, and then I was really excited."
The purposefully Gothic trappings of the series were a big draw to Christie when she was young, and it still has a great deal of appeal to Christie well into adulthood -- where she admits she and her friends have discovered she's a "late on-set goth. I didn't realize this until maybe the last year. I actually said to a friend of mine, 'I got to ask you something. You've got to tell me the truth. Do you think I'm a goth?' And she said, 'I have to admit, for many years now, I've certainly thought you are goth.' Hence my early love of The Addams Family, my absolute adoration of Anjelica Huston and Christina Ricci, who so immaculately played Wednesday."
"I was just obsessed," Christie continued, "by this little girl who seemed to have the same kind of feelings about life as I did but was unafraid to display them. I just couldn't believe it when I actually got a text saying, 'Tim Burton wants to speak to you about his new Addams Family project.' I've been really so fortunate, but when those things come together -- that weird alchemy of The Addams Family and Tim Burton, someone I wanted to work with my entire life... I sort of had to stop looking at it and do some breathing, lower the heart rate. I don't say it lightly: it's a dream come true."
Christie had nothing but kind words about Burton's overall output as well, revealing she's spent years as a fan of the director's unique approaches to filmmaking -- stretching all the way back to her younger years when his earliest films were first coming out. "I was very young when I saw Pee-wee's Big Adventure. I don't know how I saw it, and I loved it so much... I was obsessed with Beetlejuice. I had a long-standing longing to be the woman who's in two halves. That was the epitome of glamour. It was the sort of zenith of any existence I could have in my infant mind, so it really shaped me. What I love so much about Tim was that it felt like there was a voice for me. As someone that had always felt like an outsider, ever since I can remember, for so many different reasons, there was someone that said, 'I see you, and here are so many different versions.' It felt like this was our world. That felt like a more tangible representation of reality as I interpreted it, or wanted to interpret it, than the often kind of brutality and impenetrability of our social structures and life out there."
"So it was hugely informative to me, too," Christie explained, "because when I left drama school, and I was doing plays, and I was acting on stage, I really wanted to do film. I love film, I really do -- acting on screen. I remember people saying to me, there was one particular brilliant director called Richard Jones, who's a theater and opera director, and he's also very interested in German expression -- he was like, 'Can't you just work with Tim Burton?! He'll get you. You'll see that you're beautiful.' Then, you know, less than 20 years later, I'm lucky enough to be here... It's life-enhancing. It's inspirational. His work is always about the humanity. That thing he famously says about how he loved monster movies because he could see the humanity in the monster, and that was what always broke my heart -- all his films are something reaching out of the screen and taking you by the hand, and taking you on a journey where that feeling of emptiness is gone for an hour and a half or two hours... I think that transcendence is an incredible thing."
Christie plays Larissa Weems in the series, taking on a surprisingly tricky place in Wednesday Addams' life. As the headmistress of Nevermore Academy, Weems serves as the show's primary source of authority -- something Wednesday bristles against, especially when she learns of the close bond Weems shares with her mother, Morticia. Weems isn't portrayed as some bitter dean levying out punishment for the sake of it. Christie gives the character a warm (but hard) edge that Wednesday must learn to contend with. Reflecting on the show's ability to balance those elements, Christie explained how "life, to me, and my understanding and comprehension of it, is often very different to other people's. Where some people may see logic or cynicism, I can often see something else."
"As someone that has always felt like an outsider," Christie continued, "a lot of the characters I play tend to have a similar outside feeling to them. So to me, it's just the world because we live in such an extraordinarily diverse and bizarre world. There is nothing more bizarre than just everyday life, as some of our experiences of UK politics have shown us. I think that it is always about human beings. It is always about a human experience. No matter how operatic it may appear, it's just another further expression of the human experience. That's the way I always approach it. It's a person, and the energies might be bigger or smaller, but it is a person."
As the series progressed and Christie got the chance to see Weems and Wednesday bounce more off one another, she discovered that "what I really loved about the relationship between Wednesday and Larissa Weems was Larissa's loneliness, her unbelievable loneliness. She's alone in that huge office, and there's Wednesday, who makes her question everything about her career and her life and the choices that she's made and really challenges her and confronts her with herself. They have a weird connection. It is odd, and it goes beyond teacher and pupil. It goes somewhere else entirely. Jenna Ortega is such a magnificent performer and a wonderful person. We developed an incredibly strong bond, which made us feel safe to push the relationship in any direction at all, and the weirder, the better, I think we found."
I'm just really interested in the role of bureaucracy," Christie noted, explaining how she found herself drawn increasingly across other projects as well. "It's something I've looked at with a few of my last projects, actually, because I think we live in an increasingly corporate world. It's something that we have to examine all the time. We are very much now faced with the conundrum of... Are we in service of an idea larger than ourselves to the greater good? Or are we in service of our own ego, about our survival, and about our survival systems? So it was thrilling for me to play that kind of woman."
"The way that Wednesday is happy to subvert every single system," Christie explained, "you see that Weems actually is capable of the same. So it's a back and forth; it's a tussle. That's what's fascinating to me. I feel like it does touch upon some of the themes that we're experiencing in our world, and particularly the idea of a woman who's very self-created, who presents herself as a Hitchcock-style myth, but instead of being like those screen sirens -- [who are,] in those stories, constantly being battered and having to fight against the trauma exacted on them -- [Leems] is in control of her own destiny. She is battling through it, but she is there alone."
That Hitchcock element is something Christie particularly dug into, finding to her surprise that she, Burton, and the show's costume designer Colleen Atwood all shared the same reference pool for Leems' design. "The fact that there was that convergence of ideas was absolutely extraordinary to all of us. For me, who would never be cast in that kind of part until now, I think it's a testament truly to Tim's vision and his ability for great humanity that he can connect to someone and see something entirely different to what they may have presented. I presented previously with the kind of characters that I've played in film and television over the last 10 years. So that was deeply refreshing because I felt seen, and I felt seen as a person and also as a performer and not objectified and not just my physical strength and height as a defining feature."
For Christie, Wednesday ended up meaning a lot of things -- especially because it let her flex dramatic muscles that she doesn't always get the chance to explore. "There's a lot to be said for acceptance because I think as an actor, then you move into a state where you become very, very free. Just by being on the sets and being around the other actors, there was a feeling for me, initially, [of] do I dare do what I want to do because surely everyone's gonna think it's crap. That is the first feeling, that it is going to be too far, too big, not relevant, and crap, but they liked it. It seemed to work, and it was literally, it was my first day of filming. I had to do something unexpected. I took it to a different place, and the next day, Tim had a chat with me and gave me some fantastic notes. Then it changed again, and it changed again."
"It's always interesting for someone who has such a heightened visual sensibility," Christie continued, "he's always focused on the reality of the situation. I think that's why his work lives so much. It was very interesting to me that these ideas I had about bureaucracy and about power became more and more relevant as [the show] unfolded -- the idea of masks, which I'm always interested in that, presenting the saccharine self within a work environment. That fascinates me in the corporate world because it's baffling when you're confronted with it. It feels impenetrable, and that's what I was interested in for Larissa Weems -- someone who seems impenetrable, but then this little girl manages to turn everything upside down."
Wednesday's eight-episode first season debuts Nov. 23 on Netflix.