Jenna Ortega says the forthcoming second season of hit Netflix series Wednesday will see a bigger role for her character’s parents and investigate the mother-daughter relationship.
Produced by Tim Burton, the supernatural comedy follows the life of Wednesday Addams, a character created by American cartoonist Charles Addams and played by Ortega.
The first season follows Wednesday as she aims to master her emerging psychic ability, prevent a killing spree, and solve the 25-year-old mystery embroiling her parents Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones).
The series, released in 2022, is the third biggest in Netflix's history. In its second week on the platform, Wednesday reached 400 million viewing hours, making it Netflix’s first English-language series ever to do so.
The trailer for the second season, released earlier in July, shows Wednesday returning to Nevermore Academy and receiving a chilling psychic vision foretelling her werewolf roommate Enid’s death.
In a new interview, Ortega offered updates on the highly anticipated second season and teased what fans could expect.
“I think one of the reasons people resonate with the Addams family so much is their strangeness,” Ortega told the BBC, amid reports that Morticia and Gomez were meant to be more present in this season.
“They're a very cohesive unit, but they're also very different from one another and stand out. They shouldn't fit [together] but they do. And that's very relatable.”
Further explaining the relationship between Wednesday and her mother, the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice star said: “It's very typical for mother and daughter to butt heads, and the daughter wanting to be her own person and feel that maybe she's not being given the space she deserves or needs to come into her own. But also the mother's desire to look after her children and be protective and not wanting them to have to deal with the same hardships that they may have faced in the past. Reading the scripts, it's very applicable to my experience as a teenager, and now.”
On the long gap between the two seasons, caused by the 2023 Hollywood writers strikes, Ortega thanked fans for being “very patient with us”.
“We made them wait for a long time. We do want to please them, but we want to do it in new and more exciting ways.”
The second season sees additions to the cast like Steve Buscemi as Nevermore principal Barry Dort, Billie Piper as head of music Isadora Capri, and Joanna Lumley as Wednesday’s grandmother.
The second season of Wednesday streams on Netflix from 6 August.
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