SPOILER ALERT: This piece contains spoilers for Wednesday Season 2 Part 2.
Hunter Doohan’s Tyler Galpin and Owen Painter’s Isaac Night (formerly the zombie Slurp) fought over their connecting family member — Tyler’s mother Françoise Galpin née Night (Frances O’Connor), who is also Isaac’s sister, in Wednesday Season 2 Part 2.
The second half of the show’s sophomore season revealed that the woman Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) escorted out of the basement of Willow Hill, where the LOIS experiments were taking place, is none other than Tyler’s mother, who was thought to be dead for 15 years.
“All he wanted was his mom back, and he thinks he has her, and then it’s so much more of a master-Hyde relationship than mother-son. [He’s] yearning for her love and affection, and then being jealous of the relationship she has with Isaac,” Doohan told Deadline. “She’s more affectionate with him, sometimes to a creepy extent. And then she dies, and he’s left with nobody and nothing. It’s another tragic point for Tyler at the end of the season.”
Tyler’s mother’s death in the finale came about after her brother, who was resurrected accidentally by Wednesday’s brother Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez), desperately tried to extract Françoise’s Hyde ability in order to give her a longer shot at life. When he was a student at Nevermore, he built a machine to do this, and he kidnapped Pugsley to use as the battery source for the contraption.
“It was a lot of familiar family dynamics wrapped into one. It was really fun to shift very quickly between parenting [Tyler] and first scolding him [to] bickering with him like I was his younger brother, fighting for attention from mom, aka sister,” Painter added. “It becomes this horrible little ball of family. That was a constant source of fun as an actor. I really enjoyed it. It grew as we worked, not [from] any one person’s intellectual ideas.”
Wednesday enlists her trusty companion, Thing, to incapacitate Isaac before he can conduct the experiment, which would leech her brother’s lifespan, but the situation backfired. Isaac then reveals that Thing is his missing right hand, which Morticia Addams (Catherine Zeta-Jones) cut off when Isaac tricked Gomez Addams (Luis Guizmán) into powering the machine to try with his sister when they were all students at Nevermore. Morticia and Gomez buried Isaac by the Skull Tree after the experiment went awry. Isaac had prepared for Gomez to die in the machine, digging his grave in advance.
“I was so excited. You read that finale fight scene, I was just jumping up and down. I also felt pressure regarding how precious of a character Thing is to the show,” Painter recalled. “I was kind of stalking Victor [Dorobantu] on set a little without telling him why, just trying to watch him do his thing and learn as much as I could. It was a good surprise.”
Thing ultimately detached himself from Isaac after Morticia called to him, and he fought the regenerated boy to the death by ripping out his clockwork heart.
“We didn’t choreograph it, but I did have an amazing moment where we started doing days of work, where I was [puppeteering Thing] a couple months in, and on the one of the first takes, [Victor] came up to me after and went, ‘It’s all wrong,’” Painter recalled. “He was teaching me. I had just missed the center of gravity [of] Thing, so he was showing me where to place [the hand] and where those movements come from.”
Painter illuminated the collaborative process of developing his zombie makeup prosthetics when he began the season as Slurp, whom Puglsey kept chained up while he regenerated from mystery meat sandwhiches. Eating the brains of many unfortunate victims also brought Isaac back to his original form and age.
“There’s so much to play with. I felt particularly lucky, because going into it, when you think about working with Tim [Burton], you think about this pretty visionary genius regarding character design, and that was something that I wanted to really take a look at and soak up as much as possible while working with him,” Painter gushed.
“Then I get there and the first month is us designing this thing, not that I’m saying ‘his ears should be here,’ but, we’re working on this character, and Tim’s coming in, and he’s really open about how it all works. He’s drawing out these changes on a pad and showing it to us, and we’re making them right there with the costume department, and they’re all such brilliant artists,” the actor continued. “It’s really astounding to work with them. And they were super collaborative. I could say, ‘I want to do this thing’ without much vocabulary, but as a creative concept, and they would be able to execute it, but also help me learn why it was happening. It was all so fascinating. I really loved it.”
In the end, Françoise begged her brother to save her son in her stead with the complex machine he had built in the Iago Clock Tower all those years ago. But Hunter wasn’t able to reap the benefits of the machine before Wednesday foiled the plan. He had told her to kill him as he lay chained to the table, but Wednesday instead freed him from the shackles with her axe, claiming she missed.
“That moment was huge for Tyler as a character in their relationship. We got to see Jenna come up with that line, ‘I missed’ on the day there,” Doohan highlighted. “She’s so in tune with that character. Like, if she’s gonna give a little, she’s not gonna just be upfront and sincere. She’s gonna do her Wednesday thing over it. It was really cool to see that.”
During a visit to now both of his dead parents’ graves, Tyler was offered a solution to the master-Hyde relationship by Isadora Capri (Billie Piper), who had previously revealed to Wednesday that she fell in love with a Hyde. To Tyler, Capri spoke of a group of Hydes hidden away somewhere who depend on each other like a pack of werewolves versus single masters. Male Hydes do not live long without a master, as was established this season.
“[He’s] very suspicious, but kind of has nothing left to lose. It’s Billie Piper. Even if she’s up to no good, I gotta go with her,” Doohan remarked.
Capri is a werewolf, and she reveals that her father was a Hyde when Tyler asks what is in the arrangement for her. She had claimed she wasn’t interested in the mother or master role for him at the beginning of the conversation. Wednesday creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar couldn’t say too much about the plans for Season 3, but they had always intended Ms. Capri’s storyline to build slowly.
“That character was always a slow burn character for us throughout the season, and getting to that ending with Tyler, in terms of learning more about her. What’s great about it is people were, were like, ‘Is she a good guy? Is she a bad guy?’ Nobody quite knew,” Gough said. “Billie brings that to a role. She’s another one with great Outcast energy because her energy is so odd, but she is so compelling as an actress, and we wanted somebody too that could be a mentor for Enid in terms of the werewolf side of her. We’ve got some big plans for her in Season 3.”
Rosy Cordero contributed to this interview. It has been edited for length and clarity.
The post ‘Wednesday’ Stars Hunter Doohan And Owen Painter Unpack Their Characters’ “Horrible Little Ball Of Family” In Season 2 Part 2 appeared first on Deadline.
