🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Wednesday is a series shrouded in mystery, but it did answer one question before dropping on Netflix: Who plays Uncle Fester?

All summer, the actor’s identity was kept under wraps, until the announcement at New York Comic Con that comedian Fred Armisen would take on the rather electric role, shaved head and all. But the speculation surrounding his casting came as a surprise to Armisen — he thought everyone was already in on it.

“That was really funny, because I’m me, so I’m like, ‘How do you not know it’s me? Come on.’ But no, they did a really good job with it. And it’s kind of nice that it adds mystery to the show. I like that there’s mystery around it, that there’s mystery in it,” Armisen tells Tudum over Zoom one aptly overcast October morning. 

Armisen makes his special appearance in Episode 7 of Wednesday, “If You Don’t Woe Me by Now.” He shows up to provide a much-missed friendly face to his “pigtailed protégé” of a niece, Wednesday (Jenna Ortega)... and to find a place to crash while on the lam following his latest kleptomaniacal antics. 

When Armisen first heard about the possibility of joining the twisted world of Wednesday, all he needed to hear was that Tim Burton was involved (as a director and an executive producer) and he was sold. “Then, when I heard what the project was, I wanted to do it even more. And when it was like, ‘Well, it’s Uncle Fester,’ it just made complete sense to me. It doesn’t happen that often, but it was a real case of, ‘Oh, I’m the guy for this. This is something that I would really love to do.’ ”

Armisen’s goal wasn’t to make the dried-ketchup-and-beehive-munching Fester his own, per se. Rather, he “just wanted to carry on the tradition of the character” and let the weird uncle  continue to... well, fester as he always has. “I really like that the character has parameters,” he says. 

He was steeped in Addams Family values already, having loved the “bizarre” clan growing up. “It’s everything that I love, spooky and funny at the same time.”

Vlad Cioplea/Netflix

One detail he specifically wanted to re-create was Fester’s voice from the original 1960s TV series, which proved “pretty easy” for the actor. Keeping in mind Christopher Lloyd’s incarnation from the ’90s live-action films and the 2019 animated version, Armisen thought, “Let me just keep it to what we’re familiar with, and then maybe the way my face is will dictate my version of it.” He wouldn’t have to try too hard to put his own spin on tradition; essentially, the Los Espookys co-creator “really wanted to deliver. I was just like, ‘I want to add a little bit of just the right thing.’ ”

That “just the right thing” turns out to be the spark of joy and kinship that makes the normally dour Wednesday light up for the first time in the series upon seeing her beloved uncle again. The elder Addams child famously never smiles, but it’s instantly clear that around Uncle Fester, she makes an exception.

Uncle Fester Drops In | Wednesday S1Spark's fly when he's on-screen.

Armisen thinks Fester and Wednesday’s closeness stems from the fact that they each see a kindred spirit in the other: a fellow outcast not only in the world, but also within their own family. “Even though it’s a world of weirdos, she’s an extra weirdo and so is he,” he reflects. “But still, they’re both smiling — that’s the fun part. They’re both having fun. They’re not dark black sheep. It’s more like a weird black sheep.”

The fact that Fester is Wednesday’s uncle also strengthens their bond. “You know how immediate family drives you crazy?” Armisen says. “It’s kind of like my relationship as an uncle to my nephews. I get to pop in for a few episodes of my sister’s life, and it’s fun — I keep it fun — and then that’s it.”

For Fester, the fun includes gifting Wednesday a cadaver for her 13th birthday and arriving at Nevermore Academy just in time to identify the menacing monster ravaging the campus. Once Wednesday shows him a drawing of the beast, he easily recognizes it as a Hyde. 

Vlad Cioplea/Netflix

Armisen loved playing a turning point in the series’ overarching mystery, and the scene was actually the first he filmed in his month on location in Romania. As with his casting, he was surprised and gratified to be involved in a big reveal. His assumption was “that she would’ve been told all this stuff all along, but I was like, ‘Ooh, I’m the one really identifying the drawing,’ ” he says. “So day one was like, ‘Oh, there’s real stuff going on.’”

There’s more real stuff, too. Although Fester has what Armisen calls “a casual sort of connection” to his electrical superpowers, he uses every ounce of them to revive Thing after he’s stabbed in a raid on Wednesday’s dorm room. The revival scene serves as one of the most moving in the deadpan series. Wednesday is known for rarely expressing emotion, but she shows real vulnerability when someone she truly loves is endangered.

“Thing also represents the rest of her family, that it was sent from,” Armisen adds. “That’s something that isn’t in the [original] TV show, that serious moment of ‘Thing might die’ or ‘Thing dies.’ That’s where this becomes more of a Tim Burton version of things.”

Even before discovering that bringing Thing back to life would be a climactic moment for his character, Armisen was curious how the show would bring Thing to life in the first place. “Even though I’m in show business and I know that there’s special effects, I was still like, ‘How are they going to do this? How do they have this hand? Is it a robotic hand? Is it a prosthetic hand?’”

All natural questions surrounding the enigma of Thing, whose expressiveness is thanks to a very agile Romanian magician (Victor Dorobantu) whose body was digitally removed in post production. But one mystery proved easier for Armisen to crack: the overall look of the series. He found all the clues he needed simply from driving Wednesday around in Fester’s getaway mobile — a motorcycle and sidecar painted like a cow.

While it’s not necessarily the vehicle one would normally associate with Uncle Fester, Armisen fondly recalls a picture someone took of him and Ortega on the chopper: “And when I saw that picture, I could see the whole TV show. There’s an insanity to it, and it’s fun.” Now that’s a picture that should be hung up in the Nightshade Library.

Watch Wednesday now on Netflix.

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