‘I don’t think about my legacy – or my tombstone’

As ‘Wednesday’ returns for season two, Louis Chilton speaks to Tim Burton and series creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar about the show’s runaway success, working with Jenna Ortega, and the ‘aspirational’ appeal of Wednesday Addams

- By Louis Chilton

In Wednesday’s long-awaited second season, Wednesday Addams, perennial outsider, finds herself – bewilderingly – on the inside. After foiling the villain and saving Nevermore school, Jenna Ortega’s teenage misanthrope is the institution’s new “It- girl". All eyes are on her, and predictably enough, she hates it.

It's a predicament to which the creators and stars of Wednesday can surely relate.

Netflix’s gothic comedy-drama - based on the dark, satirical characters concocted by cartoonist Charles Addams - finds itself in a similarly discomfiting spotlight. When the first season debuted in 2022, Wednesday was the streaming site’s third-biggest series ever. Ortega, its now 22-year-old lead, became movie-star famous nearly overnight. One episode even kicked off a viral dance trend. “Everything I do, whether it’s a success or a failure, it’s always a surprise to me,” says Tim Burton, who produces the series and has directed half of the episodes to date. “And I’m not the kind of person who goes, ‘Oh, this is why season one was successful, and therefore I know what to do.’ I don’t get very worried about this.”

In all its previous incarnations (among them a 1964 TV series, a couple of blisteringly funny early Nineties films and a hit stage musical), The Addams Family has centred around the family unit - an oddball household of macabre aristocrats. Wednesday swivelled to focus on just the elder Addams child, but showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar took pains to maintain the pith of the source material. “There’s so much in those Charles Addams cartoons,” Gough tells me. “They’re funny, they’re subversive.”

Millar gestures to the opening of season two, in which we rejoin