Tim Burton's ‘Wednesday’ wedded to Catherine Zeta-Jones & Luis Guzmán as Addams Family's first couple

Tim Burton’s Netflix revival of a monster family classic has found its matriarch — and it’s a star as iconic as the role demands. The streamer has just revealed that Oscar winner Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago, The Mask of Zorro) will join fellow addition Luis Guzmán (Oz, Boogie Nights) in rounding out the cast of Wednesday, the newly-imagined misadventures of the Addams Family.

Netflix teased the dual casting pickup on Twitter today, revealing that Zeta-Jones will "step into the iconic silhouette of Morticia Addams," while Guzmán "will bring to life the debonair Gomez Addams" in Burton’s upcoming limited series. Announced last fall, Wednesday already has cast its namesake star in Jenna Ortega (You, Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous), who will play Wednesday Addams in an eight-episode arc that follows her "coming-of-age story" as she unravels a "supernaturally infused mystery" while attending Nevermore Academy.

Burton (Batman, Beetlejuice) himself is set to direct the series, billed as a comedy that tracks Wednesday’s growing pains as an emerging student of the psychic arts. She’ll have to learn on the go: Wednesday drops the Addams Family daughter in the middle of “a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town,” tasking her with solving “the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships of the strange and diverse student body.”

Morticia Addams looms large in classic monster lore, with Zeta-Jones the latest to take on a role that’s seen plenty of memorable portrayals. Carolyn Jones first introduced fans to Morticia in the original 1960s The Addams Family TV series, with Anjelica Huston reviving the role in the early 1990s for Paramount’s The Addams Family and its sequel, Addams Family Values. Darryl Hannah took up Huston’s mantle in 1998 at Warner Bros. for Addams Family Reunion, while Ellie Harvey portrayed Morticia in the late-1990s Fox Family series The New Addams Family. More recently, Charlize Theron has given Morticia a voice in animated form for MGM’s 2019 CGI movie The Addams Family; she'll reprise the role in upcoming sequel The Addams Family 2, which is slated to hit theaters on Oct. 1. 

In addition to directing Wednesday, Burton will serve as an executive producer alongside Smallville creators Al Gough and Miles Millar; Kayla Alpert, Steve Stark, and Addams Family franchise veterans Andrew Mittman, Kevin Miserocchi, Jonathan Glickman, and Gail Berman are also set as executive producers, via Deadline. Gough and Millar are writing and showrunning the series.

There’s no word yet on when Wednesday will make its haunted Netflix premiere... presumably it will be on a Wednesday though.