The Addams Family has been turned into a Netflix show that focuses on the oldest child, Gomez Addams.
Christie, who is known for playing Brienne of Tarth on the HBO show Game of Thrones, plays Larissa Weems, the head of the Nevermore Academy. Director Tim Burton gave her the freedom to shape the character in any way she wanted.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, she stated:
He said, ‘You can do whatever you like with the character, feel free to make it whatever you want and we’ll keep talking about it.
And that was an unbelievable opportunity from this great cinematic master.
She worked with director Tim Burton and costume designer Colleen Atwood to bring the character to life. Their work together led to an acting debut for the 44-year-old actress.
It is the first time I’ve ever felt beautiful on screen,
Christie said.
I cannot express my extreme gratitude more heartily to Tim and Colleen and our hair and makeup team.
Colleen Atwood is rightfully a legend, and what she does is close to witchcraft in terms of transformation. It is an honour of my life to work with Colleen and to work with Tim.
The Star Wars actor continued:
The brilliance of Colleen is she is supremely talented. She’s also hugely experienced.
That experience cannot be underlined enough because she is able to look at your body and emphasise different elements, emphasise your strong points.
The way she made me feel was my body felt celebrated and beautiful. Never once did I feel like there was something to hide or something to be ashamed of. She made me feel incredible.
She was also enormously collaborative and wanted to know what I thought, which I was quite nervous initially to show her any references, but she welcomed them and she loved them.
When it came to what they were going to do with Larissa, it looks like all three of them were on the same page.
This idea kept coming to me of Larissa Weems being someone who was an outcast, who went to a school for outcasts, that was always second best and was always in Morticia’s [Catherine Zeta-Jones] shadow,
she said.
What kept coming to me was this idea of this Hitchcock-style heroin, this screen siren, that maybe that young woman would look to our mystic portal, the cinema, to be an incarnation of her fantasies. And weirdly, Tim had exactly the same idea and so did Colleen Atwood.
The eight-part series is currently the most popular show on Netflix in the UK. However, some users have complained that the streaming service “queer-baited” them into watching it.
The synopsis reads:
The series is a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore Academy.
Wednesday’s attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorised the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore.
