‘Outlandish and weird’: How Netflix star Jenna Ortega and Tim Burton bonded on the dark side

He has created some of the most distinctive, mind-bending and just plain weird movies of the last 40 years, but for writer and director Tim Burton – he of Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorhands fame – it was a late-career turn to television that left him feeling out of his depth.

“I’ve never really done it before,” says the 66-year-old. “That’s true. But for me, it didn’t seem any different than making a movie. I mean, we worked a little quicker, it was a little bit more juggling a lot more things … in terms of [a] different kind of structure, which I wasn’t really used to at all.”

Burton was on a flying visit to Sydney with the cast and creators of Wednesday, The Addams Family spin-off that in 2022 became Netflix’s most-watched English-language show of all time, with 252 million views. The series follows the family’s teenage daughter as she tries to solve a murder mystery at her school, Nevermore Academy. In typical Burton style, and in keeping with Addams Family lore, it’s creepy and kooky with a deeply black sense of humour.

“I wasn’t really an Addams Family fan, per se, but the character Wednesday I really identified with,” he says. “When I read it, I felt exactly her worldview, I felt same way about school, family, psychiatry, society. So for me, it was a character that, even though I’m a middle-aged man, I felt very much like Wednesday. ”

So he’s really a teenage girl at heart?

“Yeah, I’m completely reversing my age as I get older,” he says, laughing.

The show’s 22-year-old star Jenna Ortega has developed a deeply creative bond with Burton – starring not only in two seasons of Wednesday, but also last year’s Beetlejuice sequel. Burton is director renowned for keeping a close circle of actors he prefers to work with – Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Danny DeVito – and Ortega has now been welcomed into that family.

“As somebody who is coming into this job with a lot of anxiety and uncertainty, he’s one of those people and presences in my life that can release that,” she says. “He’s been nothing but professional and inspiring and outlandish and weird and funny. It’s like making something with your friends. Every day we show up and we rehearse, but he lets us figure out what we want to do, and he works around us, and then it’s just jokes and hanging out.”

Wednesday’s showrunners Albert Gough and Miles Millar (who grew up in Sydney before high-tailing it to England) believe part of the show’s success is down to the fact we can all still relate to being a teenager. Apart from having a severed hand following her around, Wednesday Addams is just a teenager with a weird parents and an annoying younger brother.

“It’s such a dramatic time in your life when you think about where you were at 13 or 14 and where you are even at 18 and 19,” says Gough. “It just feels like a massive journey in seven or eight years. So I think that’s, that’s part of it [its appeal], and you can always tap into those [feelings]. The world, the world is always high school, or some version of it.”

Adds Millar: “Hollywood certainly is.”

And speaking of Hollywood, we do seem to be stuck in the middle of a prequel, sequel, spin-off, remake boom in film and TV. From Wednesday to Superman, the Fantastic Four, Alien: Earth, And Just Like That… and yes, even the dad TV staples of Yellowstone and NCIS, it feels like almost everything is based on existing IP these days. Does that mean creativity and original ideas are dead?

“I agree, but at the same time, I grew up watching monster movies,” says Burton. “If you analyse monster movies, they’re all the same kind of story. It’s like fables. There’s a certain amount of stories that you can tell in different ways.

“I think you can find originality anything. It’s like comic books, they keep redoing [those], but that kind of idea it can be told in different ways. Obviously, there should be room for original things, that’s always the most important. But these other things have a place as well.”

And while Gough and Millar, who also wrote the Superman TV series Smallville and the 2004 film Spider-Man 2, don’t consider Wednesday to be a reboot or a remake, they do acknowledge it’s tough to get an original idea made for film or TV.

“Audiences need to embrace originality,” says Millar. “It’s as much the audience’s lack of taking a risk on things as it is the studios.”

Adds Gough: “You have a generation of studios convincing audiences not to do it [watch original shows]. But we all forget, Star Wars was an original script. Raiders [of the Lost Ark] was an original script. Back to the Future was an original script.”

As for Burton, is there anything left surprises him? After all, his stock-in-trade for years has been surprising audiences with left-of-centre takes on iconic characters such as Batman and Willy Wonka.

“I started out as an animator, that scene surprised me,” he says. “And then I went on to be able to direct movies and things. So the whole thing is a surprise, and I think it’s always important to keep being surprised, no matter how long it goes on.”

Wednesday (season two) is now streaming on Netflix.

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