Allison Janney The Addams Family

Think Your Family Is Weird?

Cast: Allison Janney, Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Finn Wolfhard, Nick Kroll, Chloë Grace Moretz, Elsie Fisher, Bette Midler, Aimee Garcia
Directors: Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon
Genre: Animation, Comedy
Rated: PG
Running Time: 87 minutes

Synopsis: Long adored for being creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky, The Addams Family returns to the big screen this Halloween in a way you haven't seen them before.

In the first animated film featuring this iconic family, Gomez, Morticia, Pugsley, Wednesday, Uncle Fester, and Grandma join a lively cast of characters to remind us why they are the most eccentric family in the neighborhood.

Except in this case, they are the most eccentric family in the run-down mansion on top of a fog- surrounded hill in New Jersey (a nod to creator Charles Addams' home state). Happily ensconced in their Addams way of life for years, Gomez and Morticia prepare for a visit from their extended family for Pugsley's "Sabre Mazurka," a rite of passage ceremony to prove he is ready to become an Addams Family man.

Little does the family know, their neighbor down the hill " design TV phenom Margaux Needler " is constructing a prefabricated community, replete with technicolor pop and perfectionism. When the fog lifts, Margaux is disconcerted to see The Addams Family mansion " the one thing standing between her dream of selling all the houses in the neighborhood and being adored as a TV personality forever.

As Pugsley struggles to learn the complicated "Sabre Mazurka" routine, Wednesday finds herself struggling with coming-of-age. She befriends Margaux's daughter Parker and pushes boundaries, as well as, Morticia's buttons by joining in on "normal" pursuits like attending public school, cheerleading, and pink barrettes.

A hilarious and endearing tale of acceptance, The Addams Family brings Charles Addams' New Yorker cartoons to life and will inspire people of all ages to embrace a new idea of what is normal.

The Addams Family
Release Date: December 5th, 2019

About The Production

They're Creepy, Kooky, Mysterious and Spooky

For Co-Directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan, one of the keys to making a fresh Addams Family film was to go back to the main source: Charles Addams' creepy, spooky, and altogether kooky New Yorker comics. Starting in the 1930s, his shadowy line drawings delivered a subversive pleasure: dark themes, genius chiaroscuro, and zippy one-liners.

The approach was unique, for sure " there have been two short-lived animated TV series but never an animated feature film. But what do you do when you've got an established property that people know and love that has been turned into live action movies and a TV show and even a Broadway musical? "There's a nostalgia factor, but it's not a reboot," says producer Gail Berman. "I saw it as another way into this world of the Addams family."

"We went back to the original cartoons to start at the beginning, when he first came up with these characters," says Vernon. "In every iteration, the Addams were already this congealed family unit. We wanted to actually start them in different places and see how they came to be."

Tiernan agrees: "Nobody ever really went into, how did Gomez and Morticia meet and how did they end up in the house? An origin story. And that immediately set it apart from other Addams material that had come before. It just started to come alive as soon as that was introduced."

Added to the brilliant idea to make this an animated film, the team had all the necessary ingredients to breathe new life into this beloved family. "With animation right now, you have more of a believable way to tell stories about things that aren't necessarily in our world," says Vernon. "For The Addams Family we started creating moving trees and talking envelopes and at one point, we had tables moving around and shrunken heads that jump up and down and sing. We took all these things the TV show and the live-action movie talked about " you know, that were just kind of like a verbal joke " and we actually brought them in visually and let people see this world. At the time, it probably was too complicated to actually show. With animation, you can show pretty much anything you want."

"Of course, any filmmaker has to direct people's attention where they feel they want to direct it to tell the story," says Tiernan. But medium aside, ultimately, a great story is a great story. "I don't think there's any difference between telling a story in a live-action film and a story in an animated film," says Vernon. "But the story itself," says Tiernan. "like any good story, has got to have heart, it's got to have something that people can connect to. And this one definitely does."

With the vibe of this new film in place, the creative team set about figuring out how to adapt the original Addams-verse to the screen. "They don't look exactly like Charles Addams' original cartoons, but they're very much inspired by them and they're in the same mold, so they do have an original look for our movie," says Tiernan. "There's a direct line, a direct thread that goes from what we're doing all the way back to Charles Addams' original cartoons, and that was very important for us to keep that."

Ask anyone involved in this project why they wanted to be a part of it, and they will all offer some variation of: "Well, it's The Addams Family." Like some kind of nostalgia mantra, this sentence drives the sentiment of not only everyone on the creative team, but also audiences who line up for every iteration of this family's life and legacy. (Including Addams Fest in creator Charles Addams' hometown of Westfield, NJ, but we'll get to that later.)

"I don't think there's anyone I could run into on the street today who wouldn't have a connection to The Addams Family," says Allison Janney, who voices Margaux Needler. "They are an iconic, classic, 'American,' fictional family. They embrace the macabre and the dark and sort of gruesome side of life. And what's so wonderful about the Addams Family is they have no idea why they're that weird anyway. It endears you to them."

"We've really got a wide range of appeal," says Berman. "It was an opportunity to start something new and feel really fresh. So, we had a desire to have some new blood in the mix and create our own original-feeling group and family, and that's what happened. I think we succeeded in putting together a very fresh popping group of actors in an animated film, many of whom had never done animation before."

When Oscar Isaac, the team's number one choice for family patriarch Gomez Addams, signed on, The Addams Family began to feel real. "Charlize Theron joined and Nick Kroll and Allison Janney," says Berman. "It wound up being the dream cast."

Like most people, Isaac was familiar with the TV shows and films, but had a more personal connection. "Raul Julia was one of my favorite actors, and to see him play Gomez with such relish definitely made an impression on me when I was young," says Isaac. "To get to play that role as an homage to him has been really special."

Charlize Theron, who voices Morticia, was drawn to the enduring legacy of this quirky clan that, in a subversively delightful way, represents what family really means. "I think at the core, why people really respond to the Addams family, is because ultimately they will always be Addams and they take pride in that and never try to change themselves for anybody," she says. "We all want to believe that we live our lives authentically, especially within our family circle. And this is a family that lives to the extreme. But there is something that is very grounded, because even though they're trying to kill each other, they love each other, and you really see that."

Everyone involved in the movie also found the Addams Family's struggle incredibly topical and important. "It is an immigrant story. They come from the old country to America and set up roots and build their life here. And someone from outside their world comes in and tries to set up a neighborhood that they don't fit into, so she tries to run them out," says Vernon. "Basically, it's all about acceptance and how Margaux can't see past her preconceived notions of what her neighborhood should be and accept these people that might be outside of her norm. And about her coming to terms with that and them learning to accept other ways of life. The Addams Family always accept, you know? They might think people are a little strange, but they always try to understand everyone. It's about other people having to accept them."
"This film reminds us that whatever we think is normal is something very different for each individual," adds Theron. "Of course, it's a really fun film to go see, but there is an underlying message: being different is not a bad thing and we need to celebrate that a little bit more. And I love that I'm a part of something that carries that message."

Berman agrees. "Charles Addams created a world that is really fun but the themes of The Addams Family " the idea of the outsider being welcomed and absorbed into society " remain a difficult topic," she says. "They're looked at as being different and scary or unusual, and yet when you dig a little bit beneath the surface, they're just a loving extended family, and that's the beauty of it."

"Still, the film is a comedy with lots of dark Addams touches, in the vein of family-friendly horror genre," says Tiernan. "It was important to the team to assure that like the best animated movies, The Addams Family would entertain on many levels."

"It was of utmost importance to us that we not only make this film for six-year-old children; but that we made it for families," says Vernon. "You've got to entertain the parents, too. And, when you have a property like this, that has stretched back to the 1930s, you have people that are ostensibly ninety years old who are fans of The Addams Family. So, we were very careful to make sure that this movie entertained the family and we mean six and eight-year-olds, we mean fourteen-year-olds, we mean twenty-two-year-olds, we mean thirty-five, forty-seven, fifty-six – all the way up. We want to make sure that everyone gets something out of this movie and it's not just talking down to people."

Tiernan and co-writer Matt Lieberman worked hard to find the perfect balance in tone. "We had to be constant in steering everybody away from not only gross humor, but also the fact that these guys are not vampires or werewolves or Freddie Kruger," says Tiernan. "They're just a 'regular normal family' who happen to have their own way of looking at the world. Peppered throughout, there are homages to various horror movies but it's a family movie, so it is walking that tightrope."

"And of course, there's a whole generation of younger people that might not know who The Addams Family are," says Tiernan. "So, we had a very real responsibility to make sure that we can introduce these characters to carry on the legacy that Charles Addams started so long ago. I hope wherever he is, he's happy with what we've done."

Kevin Miserocchi, spokesperson of the Charles Addams Foundation and Estate speaks on the cultural impact of the beloved characters by saying, "with the exception of two animated television series from Hanna-Barbera in the 1970s and 1990s that drastically interpreted the appearance of the characters, this is the first time they have been animated in a look that more closely resembles the Addams originals."

They Really Are a Scream #MeetTheAddams

In the film, we start with Morticia and Gomez's origin story, running from pitchfork-wielding villagers to an old insane asylum that becomes The Addams Family home, replete with a spirit constantly yelling at them to "GET OUT" and Lurch, the monsterly butler. Eventually Pugsley and Wednesday enter the picture as does Uncle Fester. Brought up to real time, the extended family has been invited to the house to celebrate Pugsley's rite of passage Sabre Mazurka. So, we are joined by well-known Addams Family characters ranging from Grandma to Cousin It, in addition to new extended family members.

We also meet home design TV personality Margaux Needler and her daughter Parker. Needler is the perky perfectionist that decorating dreams are made of, intent on turning the town down the hill from the Addams mansion into a prefabricated, theme-park like community.

With so many Addams Family projects, the directors again strived to differentiate their characters from previous iterations, from their voices to their storylines. "We wanted everyone to try to come up with their own version of these characters," says Vernon. "Like Charlize has that Mid-Atlantic accent that went out in the 1940's. Oscar came in with his Hispanic accent. Chloë Grace Moretz played Wednesday very straight and very subdued. So, I think being able to create a character rather than just coming in and being themselves enriched who these characters are in this movie."

Moretz certainly agrees. "There's really nothing that was off the table," says the actress who plays Wednesday. "We would do our sessions, and if you brought up an idea, it was yes and yes. So, we got to play around, and we built out the characters in really wonderful ways and found our own versions of them without being restricted. The script is inherently very funny, and the writing is brilliant."

Addams patriarch Gomez got the strongest revamp, thanks to Addams' original cartoons. "In all the other iterations, Gomez was a fit, thin, kind of dashing, handsome man and in the cartoons, he was never portrayed that way," says Tiernan. "We're not portraying him as a schlub " he dresses well, he has panache and style, but he's shorter than Morticia. He's got that plastic-comb moustache and the strange hair. So, he is a little stranger looking in our version, because that's the way he was in the cartoons."

"What I loved about the original drawings is that there was always this funny way of throwing the family man on his head, you know?" says Isaac. "Gomez is a very passionate, romantic character filled with a lot of bombast and big declarations, so it's really fun to just attack that kind of energy. But ultimately, he's a real family man and that's just been really fun to embody. I love also portraying a man that large that is also so nimble."

A father himself, Isaac counts his young son amongst the new Addams Family audience. "I'm excited to get to share this with him," says Isaac. "I think it's just going to not only bring in the fans of the original but also make a lot of new ones."

In contrast to the suave goofiness of her husband Gomez, Morticia Addams is positively frosty. Chic, sultry, and severe, Morticia has always been a bit of a classic character, says Theron. For Morticia's voice, they initially played around with a Romanian accent, but settled on something more distinct for this new iteration of Morticia, a mid-Atlantic accent. Then Theron listened to a lot of Katherine Hepburn recordings and made it her own.

"She is stoic and has good posture and is very articulate " and I think she's the mother hen in the family. Those were things I wanted to hang on to," says Theron. "Since this was an origin story, I wanted to find a way to suddenly bring her in when she was younger, when she fell in love with Gomez, and then slowly once they've moved in and had this family that she really kind of takes ownership of her leading role in this house."
Morticia is usually portrayed as a steely matriarch, feared and respected by everyone and rarely challenged. In this film, that changes. A surly teen, Wednesday does everything she can to get a rise out of her mother, who is still being interrogated by various extended family members for leaving them behind to start this new life.

"Morticia and Wednesday have a great, complicated relationship in this film," says Theron. "I don't have teenagers yet, but I think we're all kind of hyper aware of what it feels like to have a teenager in the house. I love the relationship between the two of them, because at the core, it's a story about a mother just fearing that she's losing her relationship with her daughter and Wednesday is growing up."

For as macabre as she is, Wednesday is tortured " and not just by Pugsley's daily attempts on her life. She's on a fairly typical teen journey/rite of passage herself: pushing boundaries and buttons.

"She knows she's a little bit strange and she likes being off-putting to people, and she finds it funny to watch people squirm. Which is fun to play," says Moretz. "But deep down she's just a teenager: she wants to make her mom mad and find her own sense of freedom. She feels really confined inside the house and she really wants to get out there. One of the first things we see about her is that she goes up to the gate and she hears something beyond the gate, and she wants to know what that is. And so, she has a sense of wonderment about what is going on outside of their haunted home. It makes sense when she sees that there is another world out there and that her mom really doesn't like the pastel colors and cheerleading and things that in our society are seen as normal, the average thing to do " that's the craziest thing that Wednesday could ever do. I think she likes the interaction with other people, too."

"Chloë Grace Moretz as Wednesday has that sort of young but quiet maturity and nice deadpan quality to her delivery that felt right for Wednesday," says Nick Kroll.

Theron is also a fan. "I'm like a stalker when it comes to Chloë Moretz," says Theron, laughing. "I've basically have tried to put her in every single film that I've either produced or acted in, and I've been fortunate enough to work with her a couple of times and she's a good friend of mine. I've always felt motherly towards her, so it's kind of perfect that we got to do this.

Moretz was only six-years old when Addams Family Values came out, but she vividly remembers watching it and was stoked to land the part of Wednesday and find her voice. Like Isaac, Moretz is excited to bring this wholly original version of this crazy family to a younger generation. "I think kids will really enjoy their first taste of The Addams Family," she says. "Because it is unlike any other story. And it's incredibly authentic, raucous, and wild. It's silly but it's also got a lot of heart, because it ultimately is about supporting one another's differences."

While everyone in the movie is struggling to accept things that are foreign to them and playing with boundaries, Pugsley gets a more physically active storyline, one in which he has to take a break from his pyrotechnic hobby to learn the "Sabre Mazurka," a rite of passage ceremony to prove he is indeed ready to become an Addams Family man. Taking a break from " literally torturing his sister Wednesday " Pugsley can't seem to grasp the frenzied routine, disappointing Gomez. Ultimately Gomez realizes that Pugsley has to march to the beat of his own demented drum.

"Finn is this super talented young actor who everybody knows from Stranger Things and IT," says Kroll. "He was perfect to be this kind of rascally kid."

"I just kind of went for it. Pure commitment and tried to embody complete chaos," says Finn Wolfhard on throwing himself into the role of Pugsley. "He loves destruction and pyro and scary things. I mean, the whole Addams Family does. But I think he just loves the chaos of it."

Pugsley and Wednesday have the natural sibling rivalries"except with an Addams twist, of course. "It's a loving competition of trying to murder each other," says Wolfhard. "A complete exaggeration of what a real family is to the fullest degree. You know when people say, 'Oh, they're brother and sister, and sometimes they want to kill each other but other times they love each other.' In the Addams Family world it's true: they really want to kill each other but in the most loving way possible. Pugsley's just falling flat on his face every time. And Wednesday's the big sister and knows more and so I think that's a really interesting dynamic."

Of course, the family wouldn't be complete without Uncle Fester. For someone so eccentric, even by Addams standards, the creative team had to find someone with a truly unique voice. Enter Nick Kroll. "Everyone knows that Uncle Fester's always been the sexiest cartoon character," he jokes. "So, when they called me to play Uncle Fester, I was like okay you're getting a sex symbol to play a sex symbol. Fine."

Uncle Fester provides a welcome goofy physical humor and dad joke persona. In the movie, Fester is there to provide emotional support to Gomez and the rest of the family but especially to Pugsley as he trains for his Sabre Mazurka.

The directors had worked with Kroll on Sausage Party and were already big fans. "I loved what he does with his voice," says Vernon. "We had Nick come in, do like half Barney Rubble from the early Flintstones and half Jackie Coogan " and then he added the little speech impediment and just nailed it."

For inspiration, Kroll looked to Curly from The Three Stooges and the original Uncle Fester, Jackie Coogan. "The original Uncle Fester on the TV show had a more high-pitched voice that felt more in line with what they were doing here. There's something about seeing that big round body and then that sort of high-pitched voice that I thought was sort of funny," says Kroll. "The Addams are all real individuals and they're all kind of outsiders even though they're very comfortable with themselves. So, I thought a sort of speech impediment would be a nice additional color to give something that we hadn't seen in previous versions of Uncle Fester and put my little signature on it."

"Nick is one of those guys who'll ad-lib lines in recording sessions that just have everybody laid out on the floor. He's unbelievably funny and has his own spin on this zany, chaotic kind of a character who seems to cause trouble wherever he goes and is constantly saying disturbing things to people, but full of fun," says Creative Producer Alex Schwartz. "He's completely hilarious and no doubt has done all kinds of terrible things that none of us want to know about, but he's lovable, you know?"

Says Kroll, "I really do love doing animated films, and especially one that feels both like this classic title that is a part of my childhood but also new to a lot of kids who don't necessarily know The Addams Family"and to introduce it to a new generation felt exciting."

Their House is a Museum Where People Come to See 'Em " The New Addams Look

Using Charles Addams' original New Yorker drawings as a jumping off point, Production Designer Patricia Atchinson was excited to develop a new animated world of The Addams Family. Atchinson, who comes from the more colorful world of kids' television was really captivated by the new color palette and mood she got to play with in The Addams Family.

"The whole creepy look of The Addams Family was a big draw," she says. "My natural drawing style is kind of creepy, so it's really cool to be able to put that into practice, being able to use dark lighting and moody lighting and a muted color scheme."

Co-Directors Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan both have extensive backgrounds in animation, citing everything from Roger Rabbit to the classic Disney and MGM storytellers as inspirations.

"There's a lot of animated fare out there where people follow a formula. So, of course people are going to immediately say, 'When people bring out an animated movie, I know exactly what I'm going to get.' But you can have a horror movie, an action movie, a romance " you can have any kind of movie you want in animation. Because animation again is a medium," says Vernon. "I've always strived to make something that is different than all the stuff you see out there."

"They didn't want it to be too cartoon-y and snappy," says Senior Animator Connor Ferguson, who like many on The Addams Family animation team, had previously worked with the directors. "It's based on a fuller animation style. Even though the characters look so strange and the designs are so crazy, it's sort of based in physical reality, which is great for the physical gags: people getting hit by things and falling down the stairs. It's way funnier when you actually feel like they're getting hurt, so everything exists in the real world."

"It's really cool, as a production designer, to work closely with the directors because you get to see the project come together on such a bigger scale," says Atchinson. "And having an opportunity to contribute to the story based on what it should look like. They're really open to collaboration. The design team is exceptional, and I have a lot of confidence in them."

As most of the creative team will tell you, having this film be animated afforded them a lot of opportunities that wouldn't be possible in a live-action production. The grandeur of the set pieces was unlimited. Take the iconic Addams Family mansion, the centerpiece of the film, which incidentally, is inspired by a house in Charles Addams' town of Westfield, New Jersey, making it devilishly funny when Gomez and Morticia realize they have found their dream home in… New Jersey.

In early meetings, the directors struggled to articulate the visual aesthetic, the delicate balance of creepy and chic. "When Patricia and the art team started designing rooms and rugs and wall treatments and couches…sometimes they went too far into the just tattered and worn and crappy- looking. And we were like, "No, no, no. These, these are beautiful pieces of furniture. They just happen to like cobwebs, so they don't take them off. So, we called it "dilapidated elegance," because the furniture in the house is dilapidated, but it's still elegant and it's beautiful in its own way."

Trying to build something so specific and nailing the tone would blow up any budget. But with animation, the sky's the limit. "The story and the big set pieces feel like they only could be told like in an animated movie," says Ferguson. "You couldn't film a lot of this stuff. It wouldn't even be possible."

With this freedom, Atchinson was intent on including as many original Charles Addams details as she could. Some of his artwork decorates the walls of the family mansion and a lot of visual cues are taken from his cartoons: the architecture of the house, a paper doll from Wednesday's bedroom, furniture, and torn wallpaper. "They play a lot with sight gags in terms of explaining how the family lives, they have a very specific taste and don't let things fall apart, but their taste is " predictably " creepy," she says.

"It's not an overly bright, overly colorful palette in that house," says Head of Lighting Laura Brosseau. "So, we get to do a lot of high-contrast lighting, it's very moody, there's a lot of atmosphere dust that we get to add into the shots and all of that layered together makes for a really cool looking shot."

In contrast to the dilapidated elegance of The Addams Family home, Margaux Needler's world is positively technicolor antiseptic. "Every time that we're in the dilapidated elegance, of the Addams house, it's apparent that this place is sort of falling apart, has seen better days, but it's warm and it's inviting and the Addams, in their weird, ooky, kooky way, all love each other dearly," says Tiernan. "As soon as we're down in the other part of town where everything is super-neat and everything's just so, there's no soul to it. Margaux doesn't get that. And she has a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with her daughter that is a direct result of that. She can't see past the fact that if everything's not pretty and perfect, then it just doesn't belong. Margaux's world is orderly – everything is clean lines, and everything is in its place, very minimalist. You would go as far as to say cold and soulless."

Homage to Charles Addams

"When you look at those old Charles Addams cartoons, his gray washes over his artwork. He really paid attention to the way that his cartoons were lit, by candlelight or by a single light and everything else just kind of drifted off into dark grays and black. There was a gloom to it, but there was a cozy gloom," says Vernon. "So, we didn't bubble gum it up at all. We did not want to make this a typical animated film and put a bunch of Easter egg colors on it – giant googly eyes and stuff like that. There's an edge, a sharpness and a darkness to this that the Addams Family deserves."

Says Brosseau, "The original comics were single-panel, hand-drawn comics, black and white. So, a lot of our character design was derived from those comics, which I think has been done really well. It was definitely challenging to imagine how those sort of roughly drawn 2D characters would look in 3D, but Patricia has done a really great job with that. It's probably not something that most people notice at first glance in those comics, but there is actually some really interesting use of light values and shadow values. And so, we could go through all of them and pick out what we could, which of these comic panels where lighting was used to help emphasize this family and their personalities. And what we can put into the shots."

Like in any movie, creating is a collaborative process, but the way the creative team on an animated film works together requires the precision of a Swiss timepiece. Since everyone is working on their own parts, communication is key. One tweak could change an entire character or scene.

How do you make a character move realistically within the constraints of that character's design? 

For example, Gomez. "We made Gomez heftier than the movie Gomez and the TV show Gomez. There was a concern that he was just going to be wandering around, kind of schlubby and not being able to do what Gomez does," says Vernon. "He still needed to be dashing. So, we looked at Jackie Gleason, as someone to look at physically for him. He's not as big as Gleason was, but he definitely moves like him. He can still do flips and twists and he's a great swordsman and can swing across on a rope and he's very Errol Flynn-like. Even though he's bigger guy and has a bigger frame than what people are used to with Gomez."

"It's kind of neat, because it's based on these characters that were drawn in two dimensions, were never meant to be brought into a 3D environment, so that's been a challenge," says Ferguson. "It makes our characters look so different compared to a lot of other 3D animated movies coming out so far."

It's interesting to think that lighting is dictated as much by the characters as by their settings, but Brousseau says that their personalities play a big part. "For lighting we are really looking at staying true to what really defines The Addams Family, that they're creepy and they're kooky, and so we're really looking to support that with our choices in color and light – what, the quality of the light that we use, how we light those characters. So really it was emphasized to us that we needed to understand each character's personality and their relationships to each other, and that's really where we start and, work from there to get to the final lighting," she says.

Ferguson and his team are responsible for the animation of all the characters' movement " from acting to speaking " so to them, the characters' personalities are also tantamount. "Sometimes we'll get a video of them reading the lines and that can be awesome because you can get their reads and subtle things you can work in," he says. "If it's something physical and you can see them doing it in a booth, maybe what they're thinking when they're reading it, and you can add that in."

For Senior Rigger Jenny Salcido, whose department gets the models and gives them the first jolt of animation such as bones and facial expressions, the design of The Addams Family characters was a welcome puzzle. They even had to develop new techniques to keep the characters true to the modified Charles Addams cartoons. "The directors wanted to stay true to the original design," she says. "So, for example, Grandma was a fun one, because she has wrinkles and a very prominent chin. We have to maintain those on the expressions, like she might have to squash and stretch and do a huge smile and still maintain those wrinkles and the chin. So even though the expression is very exaggerated, she still has to maintain her personality and her landmarks."

"If you look at all the main characters, some of the things are very special about them. Especially Morticia. Her skin tone is very light and bluish and getting that right was very important because you want her to have that dark elegance that she's known for, but you don't want her to feel like a dead person as well. So we played a lot with balancing that and also refining the fabric on the clothes to make sure that she felt elegant," says Surfacing Texture Supervisor Marie-Eve Kirkpatrick, whose team applies color and texture to everything to make sure it's in line with Atchinson's vision for the Addams visual world. "We had to make sure that Wednesday's skin tone worked with Morticia's because they are related. Since she's younger, she doesn't have as much makeup or blush or variation in her skin. But we really had to make sure that they worked well together."

Thing is…Fun Facts and Easter Eggs

• Charles Addams based a lot of his drawings on places in the town of Westfield, NJ.
• Did you know Thing had a girlfriend? Carolyn Jones, who played the original Morticia in The Addams Family series also played Thing's counterpart, Lady Fingers.
• Actresses who have played Morticia range from the original Morticia Carolyn Jones to Daryl Hannah to Liz Torres, known for her role as Miss Patti on Gilmore Girls.
• The first Addams Family animated series was a Hanna-Barbera production that only ran 1 season in 1973. Jodie Foster was the voice of Pugsley.
• In the 1960s, there was actually a dance called "The Lurch," which started as a storyline in an Addams Family episode.
• The Addams Family musical is one of the most performed musicals in high schools.
• Originally Uncle Fester was related to Morticia before he became known as Gomez's brother in later installments of Addams Family movies.
• Wednesday Addams didn't have a name in the original New Yorker cartoons. Charles Addams looked to children's poem "Monday's Child" when the TV character needed a name. (Unsurprisingly, "Wednesday's child is full of woe.")

The Addams Family – Character Descriptions

Gomez Addams
Gomez is debonair, charismatic and mischievous. He is dedicated to his children, madly in love with his wife Morticia – and also just plain mad. His favorite ways to relax are a tightened clamp set on his temple, and a vigorous round of ninja-level swordplay.

Morticia Addams
Gomez's dream ghoul, Morticia is devoted to her family and runs the Addams household. While always calm, she does not suffer fools gladly, if at all and she's been rocking a Goth-look since way before it was cool.

Wednesday Addams
Morticia's and Gomez's little storm cloud, this teen queen of shock's special skills includes lurking, nightcrawling, and tormenting her beloved younger brother. Wednesday is about to face her most horrific challenge yet: middle school.

Pugsley Addams
A relentless innovator of devilish schemes and a menacing ten-year-old on over-drive. Pugsley enjoys setting unsuccessful booby traps for his sister and bemused father.

Uncle Fester
Gomez's chrome-domed brother, and the Addams kids' crazy uncle, Fester lights up every room he enters – literally, because he's charged with electricity and can turn on a bulb simply by putting it in his mouth.

Grandma
Gomez's mom and Morticia's demanding mother-in-law, Grandma is a world traveler, sporting a wart on her nose and a wild gleam in her eye. She enjoys cheating when playing cards and offering the children the candy she keeps between her toes.

Lurch
The family's faithful butler with the body of a monster and the soul of a poet. He likes to tickle the ivories on an ancient organ and is known and loved for his cheery and frightful greeting – Yooouuu raaaannng? – to visitors at the Addams' door.

Thing
Thing is something between a beloved family pet, valet and personal assistant. Immensely good- natured, although he doesn't speak (being only a hand) he is surprisingly communicative.

The Addams Family
Release Date: December 5th, 2019