New Netflix series
Jenna Ortega on ‘Wednesday’: ‘My goal was to create a sense of nostalgia’
Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams in the Netflix series Wednesday.
© Vlad Cioplea/Netflix
In the series “Wednesday” Jenna Ortega plays the titular protagonist. In an interview, she now talked about her approach – and what feeling she wanted to arouse in the audience.
In the new Netflix series “Wednesday” Jenna Ortega can be seen as the eponymous daughter of the “Addams Family”. She didn’t discuss the role with Christina Ricci, who played the character in the 1990s. The young actress has revealed in conversation with her colleague Emma Myers “MTV News”..
Wednesday Addams is such an iconic figure, Myers says. So did Ortega feel some pressure while shooting? “I felt a lot of pressure,” admits Ortega. Because it was a popular character, she wanted to do everything right. But it was also interesting for her, because she had never played a character that had previously existed in other productions.
Ortega’s goal was therefore to give viewers a feeling of nostalgia by referring to previous versions of Wednesday – but without imitating them. That’s why the 20-year-old didn’t get any advice from her colleague Ricci. She appeared in the 1991 ‘Addams Family’ film and in the 1993 follow-up ‘The Addams Family’ as Wednesday.
“Wednesday” is the first Tim Burton series on Netflix
“I think when she was on set, neither of us said ‘Wednesday’ to each other once,” she continues. She believes that Ricci did not want to influence Ortega’s portrayal or be perceived as pretentious. Ortega, on the other hand, “didn’t want to rip Ricci off and I didn’t want to be too much like her. […] Our Wednesdays are two very different people, I think.”
The new series by director Tim Burton started on Netflix on November 23rd. In addition to Ortega and Myers, Ricci, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán, Riki Lindhome and “Game of Thrones” star Gwendoline Christie also appear in it.