Scream team
Wednesday production designer Mark Scruton joins costume designers Colleen Atwood and Mark Sutherland to share some of the secrets behind their work on Netflix’s supernatural series and how they collaborate with Tim Burton.
For the first season of Netflix series Wednesday, cast and crew were able to produce the Addams Family drama away from prying eyes on location in Romania. But when it came to returning for the sequel, they were carrying a weight of expectation after the Tim Burton-directed show became the streamer’s most popular English-language series of all time, drawing more than 350 million views since its debut in November 2022, spending 20 weeks in the global top 10 and reaching number one in 90 countries.
“Season one was great for us, because we were completely under the radar. Nobody knew, really, or cared what we were doing,” production designer Mark Scruton tells DQ. “Tim was quite happy to just be experimenting with episodic TV, and we knew the expectations were that people wanted to make a great show.
“But nobody had the level of expectation [that was there] when we came back for season two, which we just had to try to put behind us. If you went into it knowing you were trying to top what we did and carry on that level of popularity we achieved, you’d go quietly mad. So once we all patted ourselves on the back for a good job on S1, we just had to knuckle down and address the job in hand.”
Starring Jenna Ortega in the title role, Wednesday follows the eldest child of Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez Addams (Luis Guzmán) as she starts her first year at the outcast-filled boarding school Nevermore Academy, where she meets Enid (Emma Myers), a werewolf student and her eternally sunny new roommate. Over eight episodes, Wednesday must contend with her emerging psychic abilities, a murderous monster on the loose and a mystery that engulfed her parents when they were at Nevermore 25 years earlier.
Now in S2 (Part One debuted last month before Part Two launches today), Wednesday is in the grip of another supernatural mystery as her brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) arrives at Nevermore, while Morticia and Gomez become more frequent visitors than Wednesday would like. There’s also the arrival of Grandmama, Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley), alongside returning Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) and her handy, ever-present companion Thing (Victor Dorobantu).
S2 also saw the production move to Ireland, where Scruton had carried out extensive location scouting to find out whether Dublin and the surrounding area could replicate the Romanian gothic architecture featured in S1.
“By the time we finished that recce, and I brought Tim out and showed him what there was, we said, ‘Great, I think we can do this,’” Scruton says. “Then we just had to dig in. We transferred a lot of sets, and we had to rebuild some locations before we even got into the meat of actually designing the new show.”
A key set on the show is Wednesday and Enid’s dormitory, with its now-iconic stained-glass window. “That was a no-brainer. We had to rebuild that,” Scruton says. But his main concern was taking Nevermore, which had been based on Cantacuzino Castle in Bușteni, and extending it to make it a bigger, more expansive place without going back to the original location.
“It was quite an extensive CGI build beyond the existing part, so that wasn’t difficult, but finding a mix of locations and set builds was a challenge,” he says. Charleville Castle, an hour’s drive from Dublin, had the mixture of gothic architecture he was looking for, as well as the “quirks, idiosyncrasies, strangeness, hidden corridors and trap doors” that made it a perfect fit for Nevermore. The location was further supported by studio set builds.
“It was always the concern that people would just scream, ‘They moved,’ and right up until I saw the episodes, I was like, ‘Is this going to work?’ – and it did. I don’t really think you notice that we’ve shifted, because we still had to keep true to what we’d set up,” Scruton says. “Most of the sets still owe a lot to that language we established from the Romanian elements. We keep a lot of the themes, even as far as trying to copy the marble tones, the colour elements and the colour palettes we established from locations there.”
The window in Wednesday and Enid’s room was actually one of the first things the designer created, after sitting down with a blank piece of paper and a script that informed him that their room was “split in half. Enid’s is like a unicorn vomited, and Wednesday’s is black and sparse.”
“It just naturally happened. It seems ridiculous to think about it as such a basic decision, but it was almost the first decision. Initially, I had the other side with the same-coloured design, but in black and white, and that didn’t really work. Just the idea that Enid had all colour and then Wednesday scrapes off the [coloured] gels that Enid stuck on became a much more logical transition,” he says.
Scruton also considered whether magic could have drained the colour from Wednesday’s side of the window, but that idea went against one of Burton’s central tenets for the series.
“The thing that Tim was always keen on is to keep it human. Yes, they have fantastical abilities, some of these students, but at the end of the day, they’re teenagers in high school. We want those characters to feel believable, so you always try to bring it down to a more human scale,” he says. “It’s the same with the sets. We don’t build sets that are unnecessarily big for the sake of it. You’ve got to try to keep it on a human scale.”
Through the design stage of his work, Scruton was often guided by Burton’s illustrations of the world of the Addams Family, which he says aren’t far away from the Charles Addams cartoons that first featured the spooky family and spawned a film and television franchise. Showrunners Alan Gough and Miles Millar also had a clear vision for the series.
“It’s a collective process. But in the end, I have to take everything in and then come back with where I think we should go with it,” Scruton says. “Between Tim’s aesthetic, the Addams Family lore and then the scripts that Alan and Miles wrote, it was a very good foundation. There was not much ambiguity in where people wanted it to go. All I had to do was understand that.”
Behind the scenes, the desire was always to keep production inside County Wicklow’s Ashford Studios as much as possible, until it came to scenes involving a set that would be completely impractical to build or relating to something so incidental that it would be errant to spend time and money constructing it.
Then locations would come into play. One example is the scene at the start of S2 in which Wednesday is forced to give up an improbably large array of weaponry when going through airport security.
“Dublin has one big airport, and they weren’t prepared to close it for us, which was very inconvenient,” Scruton jokes, “so we had to build an airport for our own purposes. I did a lot of searching, trying to find somewhere that would fit the bill, and we ended up at Trinity College for that sequence. One of their big new buildings has got a huge atrium that we used for that.”
For maximum shooting efficiency in a single day, Scruton then had to find a room that could be turned into a psychiatrist’s office for a small flashback featuring Young Fester. Again, Trinity had the answer.
“We had this amazing modern space for the airport and around the corner was this beautiful little squirrelled-away, oak-panelled room that we could use for a psychiatrist’s office,” Scruton says. “So you have to weigh up whether something’s worth spending a lot of money, time and studio space on, compared to screen time.
“With Charleville, we could never replicate the scale it gave us. We painted it and we brought the Nevermore world to it. But what it gave back to us in production value was massive, and it was well worth the effort of going to that location. It was so beyond anything we could achieve, build wise. It’s always a judgement call in that respect.”
Another key set in S2 is psychiatric hospital Willow Hill. An abandoned seminary in Clonliffe was transformed for the show, with numerous sets – and cells – built inside its large rooms. “It was an extensive job, and that was tricky because we had quite a short window to do all that work in,” Scruton says. “Following on from that, we also built elements on the [studio] stage, so it all had to seamlessly match and flow.”
Working on Wednesday is a similarly grand task for costume designers Colleen Atwood and Mark Sutherland, who wanted to bring more contemporary fashion to the characters and set them in today’s world. “They’re a little more street,” Atwood says. “We got them out of the house.”
“In S1, you see them in [the town of] Jericho, and even though they do stand out, they don’t stand out like, ‘Oh my god, who’s that?’ It’s very different,” Sutherland says. “It’s also about making the characters more relatable to the outside world, like Wednesday and Enid. It’s making them who they are. The audience can relate to them a lot more than they did as characters in the TV show.”
Their challenge in S2 was about “trying to elevate the costumes without losing the essence of the characters,” Sutherland says. “When you go into different seasons, everything changes, but we didn’t want a lot to change. We just wanted to elevate it.”
That meant “freshening up” the returning characters while enjoying the surprise return of Gwendoline Christie’s Principal Weems and the arrival of Lumley as Grandmama.
“She’s such a wonderful talent,” Atwood says of the Absolutely Fabulous star. “That part just added another level of, ‘OK, who would be the doyenne of the Addams Family? Who would be even more Morticia than Morticia?’ That part was really fun.”
On Wednesday, costumes often play into the individual identities of each episode, from camping trips to school balls, offering plenty of scope for variety. As with the Addams Family, however, it also means a lot of black clothing.
“Well, if you’re going to be stuck with a colour, black isn’t a bad one to get stuck with,” Atwood says, “as you can layer the textures and it has a strong silhouette. It’s a fun colour to design with, and we pushed it as far as we could in different ways with each character. You can add stripes, check patterns, put black on black, black on grey, so it’s not as limiting as it sounds when you first say it.”
The scale of the series means dozens of school uniforms have to be created, with each one made bespoke. As a result, the costume department can sometimes number up to 100 people. “We have people in the work room. We have fitters, we have crowd fitters, we have breakdown artists,” Sutherland says. “We have buyers, two shooting units, sometimes three. We have a set crew, and we have a talented team that work with us. It’s a well-oiled machine.”
Wednesday isn’t the first time four-time Oscar winner Atwood – she also won an Emmy for S1 with Sutherland – has worked with Burton, having also contributed to his films Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Alice in Wonderland and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
“We have great support from our producers, and also the actors themselves are so great,” she says. “When you have actors who actually give back and love what they do and get excited about it, and have ideas with you, it makes the process, no matter how long and hard it is, a lot more fun. And it is a fun job. It really is.”
What makes it even more interesting for the costumiers is the fact the werewolves, vampires, gorgons, sirens, monsters and numerous characters with special powers are actually on set, and not created by computers during post-production. “They’re in-camera generally, it’s not just some guy in a green suit. You’re making these costumes that are on real people, which is always more fun, at least for me,” Atwood says.
“There are so many elements. That’s what I love about this show. You’re never bored,” Scruton adds. “You’re never just going, ‘Oh God, another corridor.’ It’s, ‘Today, we’re in an asylum. Today, we’re doing the most glamorous ball you can imagine. Tomorrow, we’re building a bonfire up on the hill. Next week, we’re out camping in the woods.’ It’s everything all at once, which is great.”
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