Jenna Ortega she masterfully managed to give new life to the character of Wednesday Addams in the TV series directed by Tim Burton. The project had looked interesting from the beginning, but its success has exceeded all rosy expectations: Wednesday it quickly became one of the most watched products on the streaming platform ever. The great popularity of the Netflix show is due precisely to its leading actress, who thanks to the character of Wednesday Addams has become a real star. We had already known his talent in Jane the Virgin and in the second season of Youbut with the performance of the Addams’ eldest daughter we understood what she was really capable of.
The creators of Wednesday revealed that they weren’t initially totally convinced that Jenna Ortega was the right choice for the series.
Al Gough and Miles Millar, the two creators of the hit Netflix show, revealed in an interview for IndieWire all the secrets behind the birth of a global phenomenon. Since 2019 they were developing the idea of making a spin-off centered around a member of the Addams family. Only when in January 2020 MGM Television, which held the rights to de The Addams Family, decided to invest in the project, the TV series began to take shape. They understood at that point that the hardest part would be finding the right person to play the iconic role of Wednesday Addams, which had been brought to the screen by many talented actresses in the past. Netflix provided them with a star list, which it also predicted Jenna Ortegama Al Gough e Miles Millar they weren’t sure who was the best performer for the role:
Gough : “Netflix had given us a list of actresses they liked and Jenna (Ortega) was definitely on that list“.
Millar : “But we wanted to see as many people as possible, just to really (be sure) that we found the right Wednesday“.
Al Gough said choosing the right actress was also crucial because he should have collaborated with them side by side in defining the character of Wednesday:
“The star of any show becomes your collaborator on the show, they just do it. It’s simply inevitable. And this character, there’s a precision to it. There’s a precision to Jenna Ortega’s performance, there’s a precision to how the character is written, there’s a precision to what Tim does (Burton), and we all talked about it a lot. (…) We asked ourselves: ‘What would Wednesday do?’. It was a constant conversation for us. So that exploration is something we really enjoyed about season one. And then also the actors who find their own voice within the characters that are written”.