10 Things You Might Not Know About the Addams Family

The Addams family is one of the most beloved fictional families ever, right alongside the Simpsons and the Bradys. The creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky clan has appeared in countless forms over the decades. It shows no signs of loosening its macabre grip on popular culture, with Netflix’s Wednesday introducing the characters to an entirely new generation.

But despite their enduring popularity, there are still plenty of fascinating facts to discover about Charles Addams’s delightfully eccentric creations.

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10 The Addams Family Didn’t Get Their Start on TV

Many people assume The Addams Family debuted with the 1964 television series. While the black-and-white sitcom introduced the characters to a wide audience, their origins go back much further. Charles Addams first introduced members of the family through his single-panel cartoons in The New Yorker in 1938. One of the earliest cartoons features the as-yet-unnamed Morticia coolly rejecting a vacuum cleaner salesman at her cobweb-filled Gothic mansion.

Over the following decades, Gomez, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Lurch, and the rest of the household gradually joined the cartoons. Although Addams created around 1,300 cartoons for The New Yorker, the 58 featuring his delightfully macabre family remain his best-known work.^[1]

9 They Weren’t Named Until the ’60s

The original Addams family cartoons didn’t identify the characters by name. Morticia and Wednesday first received official names through a licensed doll collection released in 1962. Morticia’s name likely comes from its similarity to the word “mortician,” while Wednesday takes her name from the familiar “Monday’s Child” nursery rhyme, which declares that “Wednesday’s child is full of woe.” Charles Addams originally preferred the names Repelli and Pubert for the father and son. Still, the television producers ultimately chose Gomez and Pugsley instead.

The television series also introduced an entirely new member of the household: Cousin Itt. According to actor Felix Silla, who first portrayed the character, “A producer dreamed it up in some nightmare.” Ironically, while the show expanded the family, it also marked the end of their appearances in The New Yorker, whose editor reportedly wanted to distance the magazine from the sitcom.^[2]

8 The Living Room Was Actually Pink

One of television’s creepiest living rooms looked dramatically different behind the scenes. Because building a completely new Gothic mansion proved too expensive, MGM repurposed an existing set from The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), knowing black-and-white television would disguise its unusual color scheme.

The eerie living room that appeared so dark on screen was actually painted bright pink. The wallpaper, rugs, and much of the furniture shared the same vibrant color, while the flowing curtains were pale yellow. To make the room even stranger, MGM filled it with unusual props, including a giant stuffed tortoise and a mounted swordfish head.

The exterior received some movie magic as well. The real Los Angeles house wasn’t imposing enough, so artists added a third story and towering roofline with a matte painting, transforming an ordinary home into one of television’s most recognizable haunted mansions.^[3]

7 Charles Addams’s Hometown Celebrates Him Every Year

Each autumn, Charles Addams’s hometown of Westfield, New Jersey, celebrates its famous native with AddamsFest, a community festival honoring both the artist and his iconic creations. Events have included masquerade balls, cemetery tours, heritage walks, art exhibits, film screenings, and other family-friendly celebrations inspired by the delightfully macabre world of The Addams Family.

Visitors can also see one of Addams’s earliest known works: a six-foot skeleton painted on the wall of a local barn, likely when he was a teenager. After experts examined the artwork and concluded it was authentic, the section of wall containing the skeleton was carefully removed, preserved, and placed on public display as a unique piece of Addams history.^[4]

6 Charles Addams Married Three Morticias

It’s often claimed that Morticia was modeled after Charles Addams’s first wife, Barbara Jean Day, but the character actually appeared before the two met. Even so, all three of Addams’s wives—Barbara Jean Day, Estelle Barbara Barb, and Marilyn Matthews Miller—shared Morticia’s distinctive dark-haired, elegant appearance. Addams himself explained that Morticia represented “sort of an ideal” and admitted he always saw “a little Gloria Swanson” in her.

Charles and Marilyn even embraced the comparison at their wedding. The pair married in a pet cemetery, dressed as Gomez and Morticia, with Marilyn wearing a black velvet gown and Addams sporting Gomez’s signature pinstriped suit. Few weddings could have been more fitting for the creator of America’s favorite spooky family.^[5]

5 Filming the Movies Was Painful for Anjelica Huston

Achieving Morticia’s iconic look in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993) came at a very real physical cost for Anjelica Huston. Director Barry Sonnenfeld explained that “Morticia has a shape only a cartoonist can draw, so we lashed Anjelica into a metal corset that created this hips-and-waist thing I’ve never seen any woman have in reality.” In her memoir, Huston recalled that “the corset was so tight that for the first few days of filming, until the boning broke in to some degree and became more pliable, I literally could not sit down and had to be transported to set from my dressing room recumbent in the back of a station wagon.”

The corset wasn’t her only challenge. To achieve Morticia’s distinctive upward-slanting eyes, small pieces of fabric were glued to Huston’s temples and pulled taut by an elastic strap hidden beneath her hair. “I was in constant discomfort, unable to turn my head without resistance,” she recalled. “Unless I released the tension at lunchtime, I had intense headaches in the afternoon, and my neck began to blister.” Morticia’s graceful elegance may have looked effortless on screen, but maintaining it demanded remarkable endurance from the actress portraying her.^[6]

4 Christina Ricci Changed Uncle Fester’s Ending

In the original script for The Addams Family (1991), audiences were never meant to learn whether Christopher Lloyd’s Uncle Fester was truly Gomez’s long-lost brother or an impostor. Nearly everyone involved with the production disliked the ambiguous ending—including the cast.

According to director Barry Sonnenfeld, the actors decided that ten-year-old Christina Ricci, who played Wednesday, would make the case for changing the script. “She gave this really impassioned plea,” Sonnenfeld recalled, admitting that he simply couldn’t say no. The filmmakers ultimately rewrote about 20 pages, revealing that Fester really was Gomez’s brother after all.

Looking back, Sonnenfeld acknowledged the cast had been right. The revised ending provided the emotional payoff audiences expected and helped cement one of the film’s most satisfying storylines.^[7]

3 Jenna Ortega and Christina Ricci Avoided Talking About Wednesday

When Netflix cast Christina Ricci alongside Jenna Ortega in Wednesday, many fans expected the actress who defined Wednesday Addams for a generation to mentor the series’ new star. Instead, the two deliberately avoided discussing the character while filming.

“I don’t think she wanted to get in the way of my performance and feel like she was overbearing,” Ortega explained. She also admitted she wanted to create her own interpretation, saying, “I didn’t want to rip her off, and I didn’t want to be too much like her.”

Only after filming wrapped did they compare notes. Ortega described the challenge of portraying an older Wednesday, explaining that the same deadpan dialogue delivered by a teenager could easily sound mean-spirited rather than innocent. Ricci agreed, recalling that similar concerns arose when she portrayed Wednesday as a teenager in Addams Family Values. Their shared experience illustrates how subtly the character changes with age, even as she retains her unmistakably macabre personality.^[8]

2 Thing Has Evolved with Every Adaptation

In Charles Addams’s original cartoons, Thing was something of a mystery. Sometimes only a hand emerged from a box, while other cartoons hinted that an entire unseen creature lurked just out of sight. When the 1960s television series entered production, the creators settled on the now-familiar disembodied hand, usually performed by Lurch actor Ted Cassidy. When both characters needed to appear together, assistant director Jack Voglin stepped in as Thing.

The 1991 film used magician Christopher Hart, whose body was removed from shots through rotoscoping, while certain scenes relied on a mechanical hand. Seaman Jacobs, co-writer of the original television pilot, later admitted he preferred the earlier mystery because “the gag was: what is at the end of the hand?”

Netflix’s Wednesday had the technology to create Thing entirely with computer-generated imagery, but the production instead relied primarily on practical effects. Magician Victor Dorobantu physically performed the role, with CGI reserved only for shots that couldn’t be achieved practically, giving the character a surprisingly tangible presence.^[9]

1 A Young Jodie Foster Voiced Pugsley—Twice

Long before becoming an Academy Award-winning actress, Jodie Foster lent her voice to Pugsley Addams. In 1972, the stars of the original television series reunited for an animated The New Scooby-Doo Movies crossover, with Foster cast as Pugsley and Cindy Henderson voicing Wednesday.

Their performances proved popular enough that both children returned the following year for Hanna-Barbera’s animated Addams Family series. Although Foster is best known for her acclaimed on-screen performances, animation remained an occasional part of her career. Years later, she provided the voice of an adult Maggie Simpson in the The Simpsons episode “Four Great Women and a Manicure.”

It’s a fun piece of Addams Family trivia: One of Hollywood’s most celebrated actresses got her start in the franchise by voicing its mischievous young son.^[10]