Wednesday Doom Tour: Tim Burton, Gwendoline Christie and creators on why macabre show connects with fans

As thousands of dressed-up fans converged on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour on Saturday night, officers from NSW Police’s Marine Area Command were chasing paparazzi away by boat.

The gathered came in black, in purple, in lace, in stripes and in Peter Pan collars. The blistering wind was blowing but it couldn’t dampen spirits as the faux-goth crowd screamed for the stars of Wednesday, Netflix’s Addams Family spin-off series.

The talent – actors Jenna Ortega, Gwendoline Christie, Emma Myer, and Hunter Doohan, writers Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, and cinema legend Tim Burton – sat on stage hours later, each dutifully answering the pre-approved questions.

Every utterance elicited applause while hundreds of smartphone cameras were hoisted up high, ready to capture every moment. They were still recording when the big screen rolled a trailer for the series – a video that had debuted days earlier and was widely available online.

But for the superfans, they had to document that very moment when that trailer was screened in the presence of their favourite stars. The reaction was very … extra.

Wednesday Addams would not have approved.

When the first season of Wednesday premiered in November 2022, it quickly became Netflix’s most-watched English-language original series, a title it held onto despite competition from Adolescence and Stranger Things. It racked up 252 million views in the first three months after release.

In the first five days after the second season’s debut, it clocked up 50 million views, several thousand of which surely belonged to that throng of fans in Sydney who clearly had not moved on from Wednesday despite the long break between episodes.

“Season one had the luxury of surprise, so, season two, it’s three years on. We live in a sort of TikTok era where things could be hot three years ago but maybe nobody is interested (anymore),” Gough told The Nightly. “We say there are three emotions in show business – depression, surprise and relief, sometimes all at once.

“We were very relieved.”

Gough and Millar started working on Wednesday in 2019, having previously collaborated on the likes of Smallville and a Charlie’s Angels TV reboot. They knew how to adapt existing intellectual property into something new.

So too did Burton, whose own work includes his take on well-known characters such as Batman, Willy Wonka, Sweeney Todd and Alice in Wonderland. Burton became interested very quickly.

When you look back through Burton’s career, an Addams Family project felt like an inevitability. Whether it’s Michelle Pfeiffer’s slinky Catwoman or the grotesquerie of Beetlejuice, almost of all his work has had the similar vibe – macabre, spooky but still kind of goofy.

But Burton has always injected his own special tone into a known quantity. “I always try to find something that appeals to me that I can identify with, whether it is an original thing like Edward Scissorhands or a known thing like Batman or Wednesday or whatever.

“That’s what I felt like when I read Wednesday. There’s something that spoke to me about Wednesday, her worldview, the way she feels about school, family, psychiatry, it’s exactly how I feel.

“So it becomes a very personal thing, that’s what makes it easier for me, is I put the blinders on, I just go for what appeals to me, then you hope that it resonates with somebody else.”

That somebody else turned out to be not just young people still going through the growing pains of coming-of-age, but all generations.

“We thought the audience would be younger,” Millar recalled. “What was amazingly gratifying and surprising was everyone watched it, and people watched it together. We get calls from grandmas in their eighties and kids who are eight.

“We didn’t necessarily anticipate that reaction or that breadth of audience, but there’s something about Wednesday and about the Addams Family that is universal. I guess people can see themselves in the character of Wednesday, everyone maybe sees themselves as an outsider, not fitting in, not comfortable in their own skin.”

Gothic fiction has been around for millennia and Wednesday in the same tradition in which heightened scares come to stand in for something else, such as feeling like an outcast, but having the superpowers and courage to stand against an overwhelming evil, whether in the form of a person or a pick-your-own-battle movement.

“It fulfils the same thing that fairytales and fables did before film, before anything,” Burton said. “It taps into those kinds of subconscious fears that we have. It’s a way of putting a symbol or a face onto the unexplained that we experience every day in our lives.”

Then there’s the timeless appeal of the Addams Family themselves, a blend of creeps and sitcom jolly.

“The Addams Family is weird,” Burton added, “But I thought about it my whole life, and I’ve never met one family that wasn’t weird. It’s very symbolic of why people identify with it, they’re weird but most families are weird.”

The family dynamic is a thread that runs through almost all of Burton’s work, Gough argued. “If you boil it down, (Burton’s movies) are family dramas, and he relates to that so well. He only does things that he loves to do, so there’s no cynicism with him. When he makes something, he wants to make it, and he loves it.”

Christie, who was revealed to be reprising her role of Principal Weems after the character’s seeming demise the previous season, sees that love all around Wednesday.

“In my experience of working in television, the things that work are the things where is authentic love from the creators and all the creatives involved, and that is endless on this show,” she said.

“Everybody is really invested in their character or creating the sets, the costumes, the lighting or whatever it may be. They love it and that’s what the audiences connect to as well.”

Burton is no stranger to fandom, having created some iconic characters and frames over his decades in cinema. He has before seen people dressed up in celebration of his work, and he has always been moved by it.

On this global Wednesday tour – Sydney was the final stop on a trip that also included South Korea, the US, the UK, Canada and Europe – he has been flocked by fans in cosplay who see a little of themselves in Wednesday Addams.

“It affects me because I know how I felt growing up and when I connected to something, it was very important to me, on an emotional and artistic level.

“When that happens, it’s a very beautiful, very emotional thing to me.”