Wednesday quickly became one of the best shows to binge watch on Netflix when it premiered to record numbers back in 2022. Now that it recently returned to the 2025 Netflix release schedule with its highly-acticipated Season 2, it’s a great time to talk about where it lands within the long-running The Addams Family franchise. Wednesday has been particularly celebrated for having the first predominantly Latino Addams family. As you watch, this question is sure to come up: Was The Addams Family always supposed to be Latino?
The answer is complicated. For many years The Addams Family has had Hispanic and Latin roots, but hasn’t fully embraced them until Wednesday. In order to understand why Wednesday casting Latino actors makes sense and perhaps better represents the kooky and spooky family than ever before, let’s take a look down memory lane for the characters’ history leading to the hit streaming show.
The First Iterations Of The Addams Family And Its Loose Latin Roots
The Addams Family got its start between the pages of The New Yorker in 1938 as cartoons by Charles Addams. He regularly brought the family together for punchlines for the magazine, but they didn’t even have first names. 58 of Addams’ thousands of illustrations for the magazine featured the family and were published in the ‘40s and ‘50s. This original iteration of the Addams family did not have any Latino or Hispanic origins attached to it, just a family of ghoulish characters with one-off gags for readers to laugh at between reading news articles and such in the magazine.
Then came the iconic ‘60s television series. The black comedy sitcom began the Hispanic origins of The Addams Family in loose terms. The actor chosen to play the Addams’ patriarch, John Astin told the Ocala Star-Banner in 1965, he was given “free rein” to name the character and inject the “Latin-lover blood in Gomez’s veins” with his portrayal of the character for the first time outside his cartoons. This was chosen rather than Charles Addams’ preferred given name of Repelli (a play on the word repellent).
Clearly the ‘60s was a different time and the same Castilian Spain stereotype would likely not fly today, but that’s how the Addams family’s Hispanic roots truly got its start. Despite the show itself only running two seasons, The Addams Family earned mainstream popularity, which only grew through syndication. The family were even featured in animation through Scooby-Doo a couple of times. Additionally, in 1977, the original cast returned for a made-for-TV movie, called Halloween with the New Addams Family.
The '90s Addams Family Movies Officially Brought Latin Representation To The Franchise
The Addams Family then found a resurgence in the ‘90s with Barry Sonnenfeld’s pair of movies, 1991’s The Addams Family and 1993’s Addams Family Values. In this iteration, Puerto Rican actor Raúl Juliá played Gomez, Anjelica Huston played Morticia, Christina Ricci was Wednesday and Christopher Lloyd was Uncle Fester among other The Addams Family cast members. With Raul Juliá’s role as Gomez, the Addams family certainly became truer to its Hispanic origins, though the rest of the family was rather culturally ambiguous – Ricci and Huston for example have mixed Italian and Scottish ancestry.
That being said, Juliá brought some Latino representation to the franchise. Teen Vogue’s Ella Cerón recalled the Hollywood father being the “first time” she ever saw her own dad “reflected back” to her on the big screen and meant something to her, despite his heritage not being directly addressed in either movie.
Juliá’s version of the character has become so beloved that when the MGM animated Addams Family movie casted its Gomez, they cast another Latino actor to play the role in Oscar Isaac. The actor cited Juliá’s portrayal as one of his “biggest inspirations” when embodying the role in a Universal Pictures featurette. It’s safe to say Juliá has left a long-lasting mark on the role that will be compared to all other iterations for years to come.
Tim Burton’s Wednesday Netflix Series Fully Embraces The Addams Family As A Family With Hispanic Heritage
This brings us to Wednesday, which has two full seasons available to stream with a Netflix subscription. Jenna Ortega is the first Wednesday Addams to also display a Latino descent like her father, with the actress being Puerto Rican and Mexican, and Luis Guzmán being Puerto Rican himself. Zeta-Jones is of Welsh and Irish Catholic descent, making the Addams a mixed race family, as other versions of them have displayed, but their children are finally also shown as Latino (with Pugley also being played by Isaac Ordonez, who has Colombian and Belize roots and Uncle Fester actor Fred Armisen being of a Venezuelan background).
It’s the most respectful depiction of the series’ roots yet. In a Netflix interview, Ortega said this about what the series’ representation means to her:
I can’t really think of any other Latin character that has the reach that Wednesday does, or the impact or the love or community that she has. And, a lot of the scripts that I’ve gotten are very stereotypical or their heritage is their entire personality, and they have to carry their flag. So, I think it was really, really empowering and incredible. She’s weird. People still fall in love with her, they’re obsessed with her. But then also, she has this bit of representation that I never really had.
Rather than the family being culturally ambiguous, the Wednesday cast makes the family indisputably Latino. In the first season, Wednesday meets her ancestor Goody Addams, who lived in Jericho, Vermont in the 1600s, like many Mexicans did during that time. Through the first season’s storyline, the Addams being “outcasts” are depicted in regards to witchcraft and other supernatural reasonings, but the storyline can also viewed as an allegory for colonialism, and how native people in places like the Americas were alienated by settlers in order to take over their land.
Additionally, in Season 2, Episode 5 Wednesday declared her favorite date to die would be on El Día De Los Muertos (a.k.a. The Day of the Dead) because it’s her favorite holiday. Later in the episode, Gomez and Pugsley wander into Pilgrim World’s celebration of it, which is pointed out to be full of cultural appropriation, and a disregard for the holiday’s true roots. The inclusion of these moments in Wednesday shows the Addams Family is officially being recognized as a Latino family. Even though it didn’t start as such, over the years it’s become a cultural touchstone of Hispanic and Latino representation in pop culture, and Wednesday helps forward that narrative in a more authentic way.
