In the new Netflix series “Wednesday” Jenna Ortega (20) can be seen as the eponymous daughter of the “Addams Family”. She did not talk about the role with Christina Ricci (42), who had already embodied the character in the 1990s. The young actress revealed this in an interview 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.
“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, in turn, “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 (64) started on Netflix on November 23. In addition to Ortega and Myers, Ricci, Catherine Zeta-Jones (53), Luis Guzmán (66), Riki Lindhome (43) and “Game of Thrones” star Gwendoline Christie (44) also appear in it.
