Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Wednesday Season 1.Who is Wednesday Addams? Well, the answer to that question really depends on who you ask. To Charles Addams, she was a sweet, but sad little girl. To director Barry Sonnenfeld and screenwriters Caroline Thompson, Larry Wilson (The Addams Family), and Paul Rudnick (Addams Family Values), she is basically a psycho killer in training. To Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, creators of Netflix’s newest teen show, Wednesday, she is a bit of both - and even a little more.
Played by Jenna Ortega, Wednesday’s titular character is gloomy, cruel, smart, sarcastic, and a loner that hides her emotions behind a cold facade. Like most teens, she feels controlled by her parents and wants to become her own person. She has visions of both the past and the future, is a constant advocate for the weak and defenseless, and dreams of becoming a writer. Ortega’s protagonist is a whole new take on a character that has had many different iterations. However, she also has a lot in common with the Wednesdays that came before her. Whether on flashbacks or dancing montages, traces of the Wednesdays that were are constantly reemerging in this new version of the character. In the end, the show creates a cohesive narrative for its titular character that suggests that all those Wednesdays of the past are maybe just multiple facets of the same girl.
Netflix's Wednesday Has a Lot in Common With Christina Ricci’s Take on the Character
Netflix’s Wednesday has the fan favorite Addams Family daughter transferring to a boarding school for outcasts after an incident at Nancy Reagan High involving a group of aquatic bullies and two bags of hungry piranhas. Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia’s (Catherina Zeta-Jones) alma mater, Nevermore Academy is home to a diverse cohort of fantastic teens, including werewolves, sirens, shape-shifters, and seers of different kinds. But some outcasts struggle to find their place even among others of their so-called kind, and Nevermore is filled with these double pariahs. There’s Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers), a werewolf that never had her first transformation; there’s Xavier (Percy Hynes White), who, despite his popularity status, spends most of his time alone and is completely ignored by his family; there’s Eugene (Moosa Mostafa), who’s just a regular bee-obsessed nerd; and, of course, there’s Wednesday - gloomy, cynical, misanthropic Wednesday.
Ortega’s character is basically a direct continuation of Christina Ricci’s take on Wednesday for The Addams Family and Addams Family Values. It’s not hard to see the connection between both versions of the character and picture them as the same person in different stages of life: Ricci is Wednesday as a tween, while Ortega is the Addams girl in the height of adolescence. Much like in the Sonnenfeld movies, Netflix’s 15-year-old Wednesday is gloomy and sarcastic, without a single drop of joy in her dark heart. Despite not actually killing anyone, she’s a serial killer in the making who has no qualms with torturing other kids or freeing them of a body part or two with the help of wild animals. Indeed, she's not that different from the girl that once threatened to cook her camp counselors on an open fire. Talk about being at that age in which a girl has only homicide in her mind…
Ortega’s and Ricci’s Wednesdays also have in common a deep dislike for the regular world - or the normie world, as the Netflix series calls it. Summer camps, smartphones, Disney movies, therapists, marriage, school dances… Suggesting any of these things to Wednesday Addams is a surefire way to get yourself on the receiving end of a gruesome revenge - or of a kiss: while in Addams Family Values it is being forced to watch children’s classics like The Little Mermaid and The Sound of Music that finally drive Wednesday to attempted murder, in Wednesday, a horror movie night with Legally Blonde on the screen is part of what endears the titular character to her normie romantic interest, Tyler (Hunter Doohan). Still, it seems only logical for the girl that was terrified of musicals and chick flicks to grow up to enjoy them for the very horror they provoke. How many horror movie fans weren't afraid of the same monsters they now love when they were kids?
But the most obvious link between Ricci’s and Ortega’s Wednesdays is how their characters relate to American founding myths. In perhaps the most remembered and beloved plot of any Addams Family film or TV show, Addams Family Values has Wednesday, her brother Pugsley (Jimmy Workman), and their friend Joel (David Krumholtz) being forced to participate in a Thanksgiving-themed summer camp play. Cast in the role of Native American leader Pocahontas, Wednesday takes the opportunity to call out the WASP-y kids, parents, and staff of Camp Chippewa for their wrongful interpretation of American history. Going completely off-script, she reminds the film's characters and viewers alike that the real relationship between the pilgrims and the 17th-century Native Americans was marked not by peaceful meals, but by genocide.
In Netflix’s Wednesday, this critical and historical accuracy-concerned side of Wednesday is brought up through the character’s relationship with the pilgrim-obsessed town of Jericho, in which Nevermore Academy is located. The plot has Wednesday and her ancestors stand in direct opposition to the first English colonizers, who hated outcasts nearly as much as they hated the native people of the land. Wednesday also has its titular character regularly calling out the people of Jericho for their unquestionable fawning for the pilgrims in general and the town’s founder, Joseph Crackstone (William Houston). In one scene, she calls the pilgrims religious zealots to three buckle-wearing boys. In another, while “volunteering” at the local pilgrim-themed park, she tells a group of German tourists that buying fudge from the park’s store would contribute to the continuous whitewashing of American history. Sounds a lot like the girl that once tried to burn people alive for suggesting the first Thanksgiving was anything but the calm before the genocidal storm.
Netflix’s Wednesday Also Pulls a Lot from Other Versions of the Character
But even if there are a lot of common threads between Ricci’s and Ortega’s Wednesdays, it would be a mistake to say that Netflix’s Wednesday drinks only from the source of the Sonnenfeld movies of the 90s. In truth, Wednesday’s Wednesday has a lot in common with every other version of the character, from the sad-looking little girl of Charles Addams' comics to the somewhat rebellious genius of MGM’s most recent animated films.
Back when Charles Addams first created Wednesday, he thought of her as a woeful little girl, with sad eyes that contrasted with the slightly maniacal gazes of the other Addams family members. Nameless at the time, just like the rest of her family, Wednesday had a melancholy streak to her. This sorrow was behind Charles Addams’ decision to name the character after a verse from the “Monday’s Child” nursery rhyme: “Wednesday’s child is full of woe”. With time, Wednesday lost her original miserable demeanor, and the character went from sorrowful to cruel.
In Wednesday, the moments in which Wednesday feels proper sadness are extremely rare. Still, the character retains some of the woefulness that plagued her first iteration. Most notably, Morticia brings up “Monday’s Child” when explaining Wednesday’s name to Principal Weems (Gwendoline Christie), but there’s also a lot of heartbreak and sorrow to be found in the prophecies about how Wednesday’s destiny is to be alone. Whenever we see Wednesday talk about the things she really cares about, such as her detective novels, there’s a tinge of sadness beneath her ice-cold facade, and Wednesday’s bleak visions are explained by her gloomy outlook on the world.
Her melancholy wasn’t the only thing that Wednesday lost with time. Both in the original comics and in the first Addams Family TV series, the character was never cruel or sarcastic like she is now. Instead, she was an extremely sweet little girl, who cried after reading stories about dragons slain by knights in shining armors. This innocent young Wednesday appears in the Netflix series in a flashback, right on episode 1. In it, a poor 6 or 7-year-old Wednesday is seen walking her pet scorpion down the street when she is accosted by a bunch of older bullies that make fun of her and kill her poisonous little friend. It is implied that this event is what gave Wednesday her mean streak and prompted her to stand up for those that can't defend themselves.
But even if she did lose her innocence on that fateful day, young Wednesday sure didn’t lose her dancing skills. Fans of the classic Addams Family series frequently remember Wednesday (Lisa Loring) for her repeated attempts to teach the family butler, Lurch (Ted Cassidy), how to dance. Whether it was ballet or more contemporary moves, Wednesday was always skillful and gracious. In the Netflix series, the character proves that she hasn’t forgotten her dancing lessons by busting some serious moves during the school Rave’N.
One trait of the new Wednesday that proved to be a little controversial is the character's rebelliousness against her family - especially her mother. Many felt that this detracted from the Addams tradition of loving and respecting each other unconditionally. However, this teenage brand of defiance didn’t come from nowhere. Released in 2019, MGM’s The Addams Family starred Chloe Grace Moretz as the voice of a Wednesday that was bored with the world inside the walls of her spooky mansion and wished to expand her horizons beyond her family. In the movie, Wednesday’s relationship with Morticia (Charlize Theron) gets so fractured that she gets to the point of wearing pink and a unicorn beret just to antagonize her mother. Moretz’s Wednesday is also as unfamiliar with modern technology as Ortega’s, even wondering out loud how so many people can fit inside a smartphone upon seeing a few pictures on her friend’s screen.
Apart from Ortega’s character, MGM’s and Addams Family Values’ Wednesdays are the oldest in the list of different iterations of the character. Both are generally thought to be around 13, the first due to the time elapsed between the first scene of the movie and the actual plot, and the latter because of Christina Ricci’s age at the time the film was shot. Given that both the original comics and the 1960s TV version of Wednesday were considerably younger, it’s not hard to imagine all four of these characters actually being the same one: a sweet little girl that grew up to become a sarcastic and questioning teen; a sad child that turn her melancholy into cruelty as the years went by. By incorporating aspects from previous iterations of Wednesday Addams into its main character, Wednesday adds to this timeline and seems to imply that all of these Wednesdays are one and the same. It’s not that there are different Wednesdays depending on who’s telling her story, it’s just that Wednesday has grown up, just like any other kid.