IT’S A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN — OR HELL — AS TIM BURTON TAKES ON THE ADDAMS FAMILY WITH WEDNESDAY.

WORDS OLLY RICHARDS

WE TALK TO HIM, LEAD JENNA ORTEGA AND MORE ABOUT GOING FULL GOTH. LET THE SPOOKING COMMENCE...

In 1976, I went to a high-school prom,” says Tim Burton, with a tone far from nostalgic. “It was the year Carrie came out. I felt like a male Carrie at that prom. I felt that feeling of having to be there but not being part of it.” He gives a big, rueful smile. “They don’t leave you, those feelings, as much as you want them to go.”

We tell this little story not to make your day a bit sadder, but to illustrate just why Burton decided to direct Wednesday, his first TV project. Despite years of fans clamouring for Burton — cinema’s patron saint of the macabre — to make an Addams Family project of some sort, he has never really been interested. It was only when presented with the chance to tell the story of a lonely teenager who hates school and doesn’t understand her parents that he felt he’d found something that click-clicked. “You know,” he grins, “Wednesday and I have the same worldview.”

Wednesday is to The Addams Family as Better Call Saul is to Breaking Bad or Frasier is to Cheers, taking a supporting character and pushing them to the centre. This show begins with the Addams’ most morose child (Jenna Ortega), now 16, being packed off to boarding school by her parents, Morticia and Gomez (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán). There, Wednesday has to face the only thing that truly unsettles her: other people. Also, a murderer who’s offing the locals at an alarming rate. But mostly: other people.

If the other Addams Family projects were weird domestic comedies, this is a weird high-school comedy.

It’s no surprise that Burton has been a fan of Addams Family creator Charles Addams for decades. As a child, he was drawn to the Addams Family cartoon-strip, following the lives of Gomez, Morticia, their odd children Wednesday and Pugsley, and other spooky family members. “I always had trouble with comic books because I never knew which box to read,” Burton says. “I was frustrated by them. Charles Addams was very simple and direct and said it in one picture. I really liked his take on things.” It wasn’t until Burton was in high school that he realised how much of Addams’ work had seeped into who he was, his own sketches taking on a very Addams-y, haunted look: “I realised the cartoons and stuff I was doing had a similar vein.” Without Charles Addams, the Tim Burton style we know might be quite different.