Tim Burton's 'Wednesday' Casts Catherine Zeta-Jones As Morticia Addams

Snap snap: Catherine Zeta-Jones has been cast to play Addams family matriarch Morticia Addams in Wednesday, the upcoming live-action Netflix series from famed filmmaker Tim Burton. This casting comes hot on the heels of a report last week that beloved character actor Luis Guzmán (Boogie Nights) will be playing Gomez Addams, so the cast is starting to shape up nicely. You actress Jenna Ortega, who showed up in The Babysitter: Killer Queen and will next be seen in the new Scream movie, is playing the title character in the series.

Our Addams family is expanding! 

Catherine Zeta-Jones will step into the iconic silhouette of Morticia Addams while Luis Guzmán will bring to life the debonair Gomez Addams in the upcoming TV series Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams and directed by Tim Burton. pic.twitter.com/MiofyWIbwy

— Netflix (@netflix) August 9, 2021

Zeta-Jones is a wonderful choice to play Morticia Addams, the stoic mother of Wednesday and Pugsley Addams. Morticia is deeply in love with her husband Gomez, and she seems to enjoy throwing him into fits of uncontrollable desire with only a few words. Zeta-Jones, who has frequently been portrayed as an object of desire in mainstream American projects, should be able to lean into that pigeonholing here. While she's arguably best known for her physical work in films like Chicago, The Mask of Zorro, and Entrapment, she also has a certain stillness as a performer which I think will serve her incredibly well in this role. It also marks a reunion between Zeta-Jones and Guzmán: the two previously appeared in Steven Soderbergh's cartel drama Traffic more than twenty years ago.

The Hollywood Reporter describes this as a "guest star" role, so don't expect her to take center stage here in the same way that previous iterations of the character have in previous Addams Family adaptations.

Tim Burton (Batman, Beetlejuice) will direct all eight episodes of Wednesday, which feels very much in line with the aesthetic he has carved out for himself in his thirty-plus year career, almost to the point where his involvement here feels like self-parody. Even with the show's slightly different approach to this story — it follows Wednesday as she heads off to Nevermore Academy instead of primarily focusing on the antics of the entire Addams family — this very much feels like familiar ground for the director, who only five years ago directed Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. This new series hails from creators and showrunners Al Gough and Miles Millar, the guys behind The CW's long-running superhero drama Smallville and the AMC action series Into the Badlands, so perhaps the combination of their oversight and Burton's direction will result in something that feels special instead of overly self-aware.