Actress Christina Ricci has revealed that she auditioned for The Addams Family with the film’s notoriously bloody school play scene. Based on Charles Addams’ cartoon and the 1964 TV series of the same name, Barry Sonnenfeld’s The Addams Family (1991) was the franchise’s first foray into film. The Addams Family was the breakout role for then-11-year-old Ricci, who stars as the macabre Wednesday Addams. The movie introduced new audiences to the altogether ooky Addams family as they reconnect with Fester, or who they at least think is Fester. Raul Julia, Angelica Houston, and Christopher Lloyd also star.
Following the original series and a ‘70s animated spinoff, The Addams Family launched a successful film franchise. A sequel with the same cast, Addams Family Values, was released in 1993, and there has since been a direct-to-TV movie starring Tim Curry and a stage musical. An animated reboot starring Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron debuted in 2019, followed by its sequel, The Addams Family 2, in October 2021.
Now, on the occasion of The Addams Family’s 30th anniversary, Ricci details her experience making the film to Bloody Disgusting. She specifically recalls the grisly recreation of an abridged scene from Hamlet, noting that the blood-soaked play was her audition scene for the film. Outfitted with prosthetics and fake blood by their Uncle Fester, Wednesday and her brother Pugsley shake up their otherwise saccharine school play with a gruesome sword fight. "That’s one of my favorite things I ever shot in my entire 30-plus-year career,” says Ricci. She was pleasantly surprised by the film’s willingness to let the Addams kids get so macabre and messy: “Nobody ever asks children to do this.” Read Ricci’s full recollection below:
"That’s one of my favorite things I ever shot in my entire 30-plus-year career. That was my audition scene. I loved it. Nobody ever asks children to do this… I thought that in itself was super fun. And then when we got to the day, we were doing the scene… we did fencing training leading up to it. That was so fun. We had tubes running up our legs, and I had that prosthetic… and the tube of blood would come and shoot out of it. So he had a tube and arm that would just… thud, to the ground. And then the blood spurted, and the whole thing."
Despite the Addams Family’s troubled production, financing issues, and numerous rewrites, the film was an overall commercial success. And, per Ricci, the film didn’t sacrifice the bizarre, humorous gore amid its production headaches. The school play scene in particular is hyperbolically bloody, with blood spurting out of prosthetics onto the play’s audience of unsuspecting parents. Wednesday and her cronies would arguably outdo themselves in Addams Family Values when they hijack their camp’s whitewashed Thanksgiving play and roast the counselors on a spit. Ricci comes into her own for the 1993 sequel, bringing Wednesday to new levels of dark deadpanning.
Though fans may consider Ricci the definitive Wednesday Addams, a new one is on the horizon in Tim Burton’s upcoming Netflix series, Wednesday. Jenna Ortega has been cast in the series’ lead role, and with appearances on You and the upcoming Scream, Ortega should be up to the task of capturing Wednesday’s dark humor and delightful menace. Wednesday features an impressive roster of co-stars for Ortega, including Luis Guzmán as Gomez and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia. While Burton is well-suited to take on the Addams’ sinister aura, it remains to be seen if Wednesday will incorporate nearly as much fake blood as The Addams Family.
Source: Bloody Disgusting