Scream star Jenna Ortega made her small-screen breakthrough last year with Wednesday, Netflix’s supernatural comedy horror series that takes inspiration from Charles Addams’ legendary Addams Family character of the same name.
After Wednesday became the second-most watched English-language series ever on Netflix, landed two Golden Globe nominations and brought Lady Gaga’s fan-favourite horror anthem Bloody Mary out of retirement, the series was (unsurprisingly) renewed for a second season (although it took them long enough).
As await to see what the future has in store for the witches, werewolves, vampires, sirens, gorgons, shapeshifters and – deep breath – psychics of Nevermore Academy, here’s a list of everything we know about season two so far, from potential release date to whether we can expect “Wenclair endgame”.
When will it be released?
With the second season of Wednesday only confirmed in January, it’s possible that the cast, crew and our favourite sentient disembodied hand haven’t even found their way onto a set just yet. At this stage, all we can do is look into our crystal ball and predict a Q4 release, as a result of the first season premiering in November (groundbreaking, we know).
However, Netflix doesn’t always time their series’ to premiere one year after on the dot, with Young Royals season one (July 2021) and two (November 2022), Sex Education season two (January 2020) and three (September 2021) and The Umbrella Academy season one (February 2019) and two (July 2020) being a few recent examples of their sporadic release strategy.
What is the plot of season 2?
The first season memorably follows Wednesday Addams as she enrols at Nevermore Academy, a private school for outcasts with supernatural abilities, after she’s expelled from her school for iconically unleashing live piranhas into the pool.
When an unidentified monster starts targeting the student body, Wednesday – with the help of Thing, the aforementioned hand, her new roommate Enid (Emma Myers) and the psychic abilities she’s inherited from her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones)- attempts to solve the crime.
Season one culminates with Tyler (Hunter Doohan), coffee shop barista and Sherriff Galpin’s (Jamie McShane) son who is romantically involved with Wednesday, revealing himself as the monster, with Christina Ricci’s botany teacher Marilyn Thornhill aka Laurel Gates as the one pulling the strings.
After defeating Tyler and Marilyn, Wednesday receives an ominous message that reads, “I’m watching you” alongside a lovely gif of a knife being plunged into her skull. Presumably, season two will explore who the sender of this message is and their connection to season one’s villains.
Will season 2 explore a Wenclair romance?
Since Wednesday dropped in full last year, fans have passionately shipped a romantic relationship between the title character and Enid, affectionately known as “Wenclair”, demanding for the showrunners to make it canon in season two. Jenna Ortega even co-signed, saying they “would have been a thing” in a “perfect world”.
The Hollywood Reporter piqued the idea of a Wenclair “endgame” during a conversation with showrunners Al Gough and Miles Millar, to which they responded that “sisterhood is key” to the show. “We’re not gonna discount anything, and, obviously, sometimes characters reveal themselves, which is the fun thing we love about television, that it’s an organic journey,” they said. And while they refrained from confirming Wenclair, they admitted that they’re “open to anything”.
“We have a roadmap, and we’d like to have routes along that map that take you in unexpected directions. So we’re open to everything. We wanna explore that friendship in every way,” Millar explained. “But we’re not gonna be, this is where you sometimes get misdirected by fans and things like that, so it’s just being really open to see how those characters develop and that friendship. As Al said, that friendship is key to our sort of vision of the show.”
While Emma Myers initially showed support for Wenclair, she later stated that she hopes Wednesday will embrace “singleness” after her previous love interest turned out to be a Hyde slash mind-controlled serial killer. “We haven’t really spoken about direction at all, so I don’t really know what the game plan is for anything,” she said. “As far as love interests go for Wednesday, I feel like, at least for a second season, she needs to take her season of singleness,” she said. “She had a whole fiasco with her men, she’s got to lay it off for a little bit.”
Who is returning?
As of writing, the full cast hasn’t been announced. The only sure-fire returnees are Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, Emma Myers as Enid Sinclair and Hunter Doohan as Tyler Galpin.
Doohan told ET that he is “coming back”, adding: “Can’t really say anything else besides that, but I’m so excited to go back.” With Tyler’s secret status as a Hyde out of the bag, the actor said he’s “excited” for season two to “explore him, fighting between the monster and the real version of him”.
In an interview with ScreenRant, Luis Guzmán also confirmed there are plans for him to return as Wednesday’s father Gomez Addams and for him to “dance” and “have a sword fight”: “And there was one other thing. I don’t know what it was, but yeah.”
Ahead of the season two renewal, co-showrunner Miles Millar told TVLine that he’d also like to explore the dynamic between the Addams Family. “We felt like we just touched the surface with those characters and the actors are so amazing in those roles,” before praising Catherine Zeta-Jones “iconic” take on Morticia.
“Catherine [Zeta-Jones] is, I think, an iconic Morticia,” he added. “The relationship between Wednesday and Morticia is also essential to the show, and the idea that Wednesday is trying to forge her own path outside the family is important.”
Additional cast members we expect to return include Isaac Ordonez as Pugsley, Fred Armisen as Uncle Fester, Jamie McShane as Sheriff Galpin, Percy Hynes White as Xavier Thorpe, Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay, Georgia Farmer as Ajax Petropolus, Naomi J. Ogawa as Yoko Tanaka, Moosa Mostafa as Eugene Ottinger and George Burcea as Lurch.
Who is not returning?
Again, not confirmed, but there were multiple deaths in the first season of Wednesday, so the following stars we don’t expect to make a comeback anytime soon: Gwendoline Christie as Principal Larissa Weems, Riki Lindhome as Dr. Valerie Kinbott and Christina Ricci as Marilyn Thornhill/Laurel Gates.
But, it’s always impossible with any series – particularly one that features supernatural elements and, again, a sentient disembodied hand – as there’s always a way for deceased characters to rise from the grave. The Vampire Diaries, hello?
The first season of Wednesday is now available to stream on Netflix.
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