Go Behind the Scenes of the Gothic Venetian Gala in Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

[quirky orchestra music] Here we go and action.

We re currently on the set of Wednesday, season two

in Dublin.

We are in Ashford Studios.

We re shooting a ball scene.

The theme has a Venetian backdrop.

So we have the chance to wear our party outfits.

Very good and cut, cut there.

[typewriter clicks] Reset, guys, reset.

We haven t made it very far yet,

but we are shooting the opening of the gala.

Steve Buscemi just came in looking like a complete idiot

on the gondola.

He s got the most ridiculous purple flora outfit.

Tim Burton has been calling him George Washington all day.

The entire Adams family is together.

Everyone s wearing dresses as big as a table.

We re having to block out the scenes

to make sure we re not bumping into one another.

It s quite fun actually.

[Tim] Take two steps forward.

We ll try that again.

The gala that we re doing now,

we talked about it when we first started

because that was one of the biggest things.

There s gonna be an 18th century gothic ball.

I think we first started talking

about this look months ago.

So to finally be in this place and be able to wear it

and show it on screen and everything looks so beautiful

with the lighting, it s just very gratifying.

Actually, yesterday was the first time

that we d seen it all in the ballroom together

and it was quite a moment.

We probably manufactured over almost a thousand pieces

of clothing for this scene.

So that s a lot of making and dyeing and aging

and prepping fabrics.

In the costume department, there s about 60, to now,

about a hundred people, including the workroom,

age of dyers, printers, costume standbys.

This is sort of the workroom adjacent stuff.

It s buttons, notions, linings, things like that.

This is where we keep all the principle costumes here.

So everything is lined up scene by scene,

character by character.

This, to me as an actor,

is one of my favorite places to be.

It s, it s the costume house.

My mother was an amazing seamstress.

She still is, and so I was brought up

with fabric bolts hanging around the house and walking

on the shag seventies carpet with needles and pins.

This was basically a shed when we arrived.

We ve had to put windows in.

We put lights in.

This is typical of what happens on these kind of projects.

We don t have permanent spaces.

We come in and inhabit a place and make it ours.

So we have our cutting tables, our machines,

and then we have this part that s the heart of it, really,

the work room.

Walking into the fitting room for the first time

and seeing what they ve come up with and the structures

and shapes and it s always really amazing to me

that they could see something like a gala on a script

and come up with something that s amazing and intricate

and beautiful, yet not contradictory of the character

and who she is.

We want variation because after you look around,

you ll look back.

[Crewman] Got it, resetting.

Here we go.

We will send in her and then go.

The adage is that an actor is never an actor

until the shoes are on.

Wardrobe is so incredibly important

to developing a character, and I do feel like even going

back to the first season when we first tried everything

on, the black, the white, the hair, the makeup,

everything about it, it is kind of hard not to start sitting

up with a straight posture, and you realize it looks kind

of silly to move too much, because you too alive

all of a sudden.

So it definitely helped, especially when it comes down

to the physicality in it.

A lot of it was the costume kind of telling me what

to do, and I just followed. [dramatic orchestra music]

When we first started Wednesday season one,

it was like a collaboration with Jenna just trying

to figure out who Wednesday is now.

She is not like she was in previous times.

She d evolved, and also we wanted Wednesday

to be more current and also for people to associate

with her, really, in the real world.

What was very important to Tim was

that we made these characters real.

Even though they were quirkier

and a bit more out there than everybody else s family,

the fundamentals people got,

and if it s rooted in reality, you can play.

There s so many different routes that you could go.

It s entirely subjective, but because it s so expressive

while all still being very black and very dark,

I think there s plenty of ways that we could go

with Wednesday s costume,

and considering she s in high school,

it s a very experimental time in one s life.

I definitely feel like you can kind

of feel the shift in her age this season.

We looked at the scripts,

Yeah. because they dictate

where the story s going.

We were lucky with this one because it s very rich.

You have contemporary, you have pilgrim world,

you have monsters, you have insane asylums,

you have all kinds of worlds that you re creating.

Obviously with Tim, you tend to go to the Victorian era just

because it s a known kind of comfort zone for him

and sort of feels right for the architecture

of the places that we re working in.

The theme for the gala was Venetian Ball, very Italian,

and everyone s dressed in period piece clothing.

It s very beautiful in there.

The gala is a fundraiser.

My character Morticia has helped

on the fundraising committee, which she s very proud of.

So she s making an extravaganza like no other extravaganza.

The motivation in our design was

what would Morticia have done?

And so that s kind of our starting point,

and then we just took the 18th century

and did a spin on it of its today combined

with rental house materials and costumes

and sort of mixed it up and mashed it up and had a blast.

There are quite a lot of 18th century costumes,

but with the students, we ve had more of a contemporary take

on the look.

The 18th century is an amazing period to riff off of.

I mean, many people have done it in fashion over the years.

Galliano, the Adrian, the old costume designers

from the forties.

So what we did is we took that vibe along with a new vibe

and sort of mixed it up.

The men s wear is a little more true to the period

in the sense of the silhouette than the women s,

which we spun out more about just because it was more fun.

There was more of it.

[Tim] And action.

In the beginning, my first inspiration for costume

was really Oscar Wild, cause she s witty.

She s droll, she has a sense of humor,

but she s dry like Oscar Wild.

So I kind of did Oscar Wild from here up,

cause it s a almost like a men s tailored waist coat

from a certain period and the shirt s kind

of like a romantic shirt, but out of silk tool,

and then I realized that from the waist down,

it needed to be dress with some presence to be in the room

with all the big costumes around it.

Something that I really appreciate about Wednesday

is I feel like she tows a great line

of always being feminine, but there s something about her

that occasionally is masculine.

She balances androgyny pretty well.

For her casual wear this season,

we tried to stay away from stripes and checks,

even though that s what everybody expects Wednesday

to be in.

So we used different layers.

Maybe we d put a white t-shirt on with a sweater

over the top so it creates its own pattern and texture.

With a character like Wednesday, I think it s very easy

to become monotonous with someone who s so deadpan

and straight, and this season was really interesting,

because I m wearing my school uniform a lot of the time,

but some of my free time clothes are a bit more nineties.

So we started off the season kind of in the summer.

So I m wearing a t-shirt at some point, things like that.

It s a bit different from first season,

which was a bit more structured silhouettes.

Wednesday wears like a quite a sporty look

for Willow Hill.

So one of the ideas was to have like a tracksuit

that we could open up at the side

that she could have another pair of pants on.

So it s just creating different layers so we can still have

that monochromatic palette.

When I first met with creative,

I remember specifically saying, I want a modern twist

to her but retain the iconic look.

This creation, for example,

you have the classic Morticia dress.

This fabric, when I found it, was in between each

of these kind of things that look like a road

to me were diamond strips, which we hand-removed.

I didn t want the brightness of the diamantes

in the middle of it.

I thought it was way more interesting without them,

and especially for Morticia.

[Mark] This is only one element of her gala dress.

As you can see, this is a exterior pannier,

which basically, in the olden days,

this would be under the garment,

which would create that Louis the 15th skirt.

So it s a little saucy.

She s showing her underwear on the exterior,

but it has everything that Morticia would love,

sharp edges, bones.

It looks painful to sit in and it is,

but what you do for art.

[Spanish guitar music]

I ve got three different stockings on.

I ve got nude, I ve got fishnet, I ve got shorts,

I ve got a leotard, I ve got the sheer shirt on,

I ve got a corset on that s [clicks] locked in.

The costume, I think I need at least a 40 minute heads up

to put it on in the morning, which sounds crazy,

but that is showbiz.

It s not easy to carry this dress around

for 15 hours a day, but that s the job,

because without all this, it d be a much harder job for me.

I haven t gotta say anything,

and I can just walk into the room,

and like anyone would go, oh, she s Morticia Adams.

[playful orchestra music]

Colleen and Mark always ask me how I feel in the costumes,

and I always feel great, and I feel great

because their entire team, all their tailors,

all the dressers, everybody looks

and they kind of have a similar reaction,

which makes me feel good and comfortable and confident.

It s nice because there s such an incredible team here

at the Wednesday set.

When we did see it all together, it felt good.

It felt like we d all done a great job together,

that it was a really a great team effort.

[Mark] I felt proud for us as a whole

because it was a lot of work.

Things have been handmade, hand stitched, hired,

rented, fitted.

Altered. So yeah, it was altered,

yeah, exactly.

So it s a great sense of achievement

and also seeing stuff on camera.

When you see like big scenes like the gala

and everything like that, for me,

that is the best part of my job.

You have all these ideas and these clothes that you put

on people, but when you see the actors actually wear em

and start performing in them, it s really a great sense

of happiness.

Wednesday, look at us, one big unhappy family.

We re about to heat things up

with a student dance routine.

[Crewman] Okay, how was that?

[Tim] Very nice, good, very nice.

All right, cut there, cut.