🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Cara mia. Mon cher. The second you hear those terms of endearment, you know exactly which fictional couple we’re talking about. You’d be hard-pressed to find a duo that stokes the flames of marital passion quite like Gomez and Morticia Addams. They may be macabre. They may consider torture an aphrodisiac. But it’s all part of the foreplay in their relationship. And on Wednesday, that’s no exception.

“Morticia and Gomez have always had an extraordinary amount of love for each other,” says Catherine Zeta-Jones, who brings the iconic matriarch to life in the series created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. 

Other incarnations of this amorous couple have come before, of course, including Charles Addams’ original 1930s cartoons for The New Yorker and Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston in the ‘90s Addams Family films. When we meet the paramours on Wednesday, it’s clear where Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) stands on her parents’ blatant lust for each other: They are beyond embarrassing.

In Wednesday, Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia are introduced, fittingly, in a hearse, with their trusty butler Lurch (George Burcea) at the wheel. As they drive their reluctant daughter off to boarding school at Nevermore Academy, they joyfully sing along to Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.” Now, parents singing along to the radio is a nauseating experience for any a teen, but for Wednesday, who loathes the exhibition of any emotion other than disdain, it’s another level of mortification. Especially when your parents also can’t keep their hands off each other in front of you.

Zeta-Jones acknowledges that while Morticia and Gomez’s public displays of affection all come from a “true and unadulterated love” for each other, they do tend “to be embarrassing for any nearby family members.”

Tomasz Lazar/Netflix

But they also have a history. Tim Burton, a director and an executive producer of the series, cites how the creative team were eager to hark back to Addams’ drawings when casting Guzmán and Zeta-Jones to play the ardent pair. “They’re a beautifully mismatched couple who are in love. That’s what I loved about it,” he tells Netflix. “I remember that feeling, and I think a lot of kids are embarrassed by their parents. And so you see this image of Catherine and Luis together, and now you get why Wednesday is Wednesday. It has to do with her parents.”

From the get-go, co-showrunners Gough and Millar were keen to delve into Wednesday’s yearning to step out of her parents’ shadow and assert her own identity. “When you first meet her parents, you understand why — her mom Morticia is a movie star like Catherine Zeta-Jones, and her dad, Gomez. has a huge personality like Luis Guzmán — and you go, ‘I completely get Wednesday’s dilemma, how does she step out of their shadows?’ You completely understand where she’s coming from.”

And Wednesday comes from a family with a long history at Nevermore. Not only does she face pressure to ingratiate herself into a new environment of outcasts when she’s more of a loner, but the legacy of her parents’ reputations at the school looms large. Her mom was captain of the fencing team, queen of the Dark Prom and president of the seance society, just to name a few of her extracurricular achievements. But in the world of Wednesday, Nevermore is also where Gomez and Morticia’s epic romance began.

When Guzmán read the script, he was thrilled to see that their love traced back to Nevermore. He remembers thinking, “This is where we met. This is where we fell in love. And, wow! High school sweethearts that are still together? That says a lot.”

Zeta-Jones echoes that the chemistry between Gomez and Morticia was rooted in her and Guzmán’s own love for each other, as they became friends after working on the 2000 film Traffic. 

Before filming began on Wednesday, the actors sat down and had a private discussion about how they wanted to approach their lovestruck characters. “I thought that was important,” Guzmán tells Tudum. “Once we had that discussion and we reached an understanding and level of comfortability with each other, it was like, ‘OK, we’re off and running.’”

Guzmán thinks the closeness displayed in that opening car scene showcased the sparks between them perfectly. “When we sang that song in the car, it meant something to both of us,” he explains. “We didn’t care if we were off-key. We didn’t care if we said the wrong words. It was about the passion that we had for each other. And the song was conveying this passion through us, to us, for us. And we just had fun, man.”

When both actors stepped on set, they were certainly aware of their predecessors. Zeta-Jones wanted to put her own twist on Morticia and had no interest in playing her as a “kind of Halloween-costumed, animated caricature.” She was more keen to lean into her identity as a mother who’s extremely in love with her husband.

That was especially pertinent as she reunited with her Chicago (2002) collaborator, costume designer Colleen Atwood, to craft Morticia’s look with Burton. “We didn’t want to have Morticia in pants all of a sudden just to contemporize her. I said, ‘No, when I close my eyes, I see Morticia, and we don’t need to vary that.’”

Guzmán also relished playing the mustachioed Gomez, a man he describes as “full of passion and love” who prides himself on being a husband and caring father. 

While Wednesday may find her parents’ ardor humiliating, she does come around to appreciating that it’s their love for each other that manifests into their love for her. It’s what grounds her and gives her a foundation to sharpen her voice (and her tongue). “Wednesday is not going to mess around. That’s not the kind of child — the type of young woman — that I’ve raised. I raised a young woman that I wanted to be strong and assert herself as a young woman,” Guzmán says.

Gomez’s pride abounds when Wednesday visits him in jail after he’s framed for murder in Episode 5, “You Reap What You Woe.” Sure, she deadpans that her mother hates seeing him in orange (when what she really means is “Gosh, mom really hates that you’re here,” Guzmán translates). But the scene becomes a touching one, as she thanks him for teaching her to “understand how imperative it is that I never lose sight of myself.”

Guzmán beams when speaking of the scene, contemplating that he thinks the world “needs to have more role models of caring fathers” who love their “little vipers” like Wednesday.

All The Nevermore Outcasts in Wednesday ExplainedLet's explain all of the Outcasts attending Nevermore Academy from Wednesday.

Wednesday’s relationship with her mother is also strengthened after they work together to clear Gomez’s name. It allows her to see Morticia for the force she is, and why she casts a long shadow in the first place. She even goes so far as to pay her mother the rare compliment, calling her “very impressive.” 

“Wednesday’s relationship with Morticia is one that a lot of girls and mothers will be able to relate to,” Ortega tells Netflix about their ebb and flow. “I know that’s something my own mother and I dealt with.”

As Wednesday comes to confide in her mother about her psychic visions, which she did indeed inherit from her maternal line, Morticia reminds her, “I know we’ve had our difficulties lately, navigating the treacherous shoals of our mother-daughter relationship. But I’m always here for you, Wednesday. Always.”

Zeta-Jones emphasizes that despite those tensions, the Addamses are a tight-knit family through and through. “When I was a kid, I remember thinking it would be so cool to be an Addams,” she says of the creepy, kooky brood. “They seem to be so happy being as crazy as they are.”

And much like Gomez, Guzmán couldn’t adore his on-screen familia more. “I’m really proud of this. This means a lot to me.”

Watch Wednesday now on Netflix.