‘Wednesday’ Stars & Creators Discuss The Show’s Mother-Daughter Relationship: “Central To The Show”

I'm Rosie Cordero and this is Deadlines On The Go with Wednesday and Netflix's FYC LA. And now we're with the stars of Wednesday, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jenna Ortega. Season two was so wonderful. Jenna, we went darker with the character this season and so many of the things that she went through. Yeah, it was really interesting. I felt like because we had already established the character and the world in the first season, season two you get to play and explore a little bit more. So it was nice to maybe be a little bit sassier at times, so you know, a little bit more troubled at times for a character who's so unbothered. Today we're here with the creators of Wednesday, Al Goff, Miles Miller, and on the VFX front we have Tom Turnbull. You know, every season she probably gets a little darker. I think season two, you know, she understood Nevermore, but then when she came back and was, you know, popular, that was something she didn't like. The mother-daughter relationship is central to the show and Al and I both have daughters and see the day-to-day mother-daughter relationship and how it can be fraught and traumatic. So it was ripped from the headlines of our own lives and we loved the sort of chemistry between Jenna and Catherine was so strong that we really wanted to play that through the season. Leticia Rowden was such an iconic image visually and we didn't want to deviate, you know, go away from that at all, but we certainly wanted to find out more about what, you know, who is Leticia Adams and the growing contentious relationship she has with her daughter and how caring she is as the matriarch of the family. And then having those moments with Jenna where we get to sword fight and take our verbal play into a physical, it was just, it was great. It was, it was a lot of fun. In terms of the working with Tim and Miles and Al on the show, I mean, there are so many different and new ideas in every script and there's so much of them. So every day it's like another thing you have to figure out and work out and that's what kind of keeps me going. I'm really happy the way it turned out and it was really fun to sort of see it all come together. It's never boring, is it, Tom? It's never boring. So we have Chris Bacon, composer, Jen Malone, music supervisor, and Nicole Weisberg, music supervisor. The show is so, there's so many musical opportunities in it because there's so many wide, a variety of characters, variety of story points, variety of sets, variety of settings. It's just, it's this huge palette from which to draw. Well, I think we, like Chris, always let the scene kind of tell us what music is needed and what music is going to support the story. With season two, it was so much bigger than season one, so many more new characters. And so it was just really playing around with what songs support the moment. Nicole, we have to talk about Lady Gaga. Yeah, it was a great experience. I mean, her team, herself, it was so professional and so much smoother than you might imagine it would be. And as soon as we all heard it, we knew it was the one. Yeah, I mean, how lucky are we? She's so, so special and so sweet. I remember when I first started hearing the murmurs and everyone on set kind of went. And we just had the best time, like you could feel the after effect of her being on set. I think Ireland. Ireland in general. It was so cute watching like crew members who you see every day suddenly like wear a dress shirt or like there's like a walkway suddenly leading to the set. So we're all walking the walkway like, oh, OK, it's the Gaga treatment. Yeah, so my world is a little different. They tend to work in the pre-existing songs and finding things that are going to fit well, that exist, that will be familiar. And for me, it's creating from bespoke music based on what I see and what I experience. I try to write music about what's happening away from picture, whether it's script or whether it's watching the episode and then step away from picture and then just see what kind of music feels like it could have been about what just happened and then start putting that against picture and then start creating the structure based on, oh, this actually does fit very well. If I speed this up a little bit and this doesn't quite work against her character because it's too busy and her performance is already, you know, kind of big. So I need to get out of the way. These wonderful shows would be nothing without, you know, the music element that kind of takes us through the journey by the hand. You heard it. There would be nothing without the music. Thank you so much for chatting with me. So looking forward to season three. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for watching. Deadline's on the go.