Netflix’s Addams Family series by Tim Burton, which will begin streaming on Wednesday of this week, features a well-rounded cast of familiar and new faces. One of the most familiar will be Gwendoline Christie, who plays Nevermore Academy Principal Larissa Weems.
“I was really interested in the role of bureaucracy in all of this,” Christie told ComingSoon. “Particularly, an outsider woman working in an institute and working with bureaucracy. It’s something I’ve looked at with a few of my last projects actually, because I think we live in an increasingly corporate world, and it’s something that we have to examine all the time. Also, we are very much now faced with the conundrum of are we in service of an idea larger than ourselves to the greater good or are we in service of our own ego? And about our survival and about our survival systems. So, it was thrilling for me to play that kind of woman.”
Christie also felt inspired by the dynamic between Weems and Wednesday as they go beyond the traditional principal and student relationship.
“Again, the relationship between an adult woman and a 16-year-old and just not really knowing where that goes, and the movement and change of the structures, the institute structures, the way that Wednesday is happy to subvert every single system you see that Weems actually is capable of the same,” Christie said of the dynamic. “So it’s a back and forth, it’s a tussle. That’s what’s fascinating to me, I feel like it does touch upon some of the themes that we’re experiencing in our world, and particularly the idea of a woman who’s very self-created, who presents herself as a Hitchcock-style myth. But instead of being like those screen sirens were, in those stories, constantly being battered and having to fight against trauma exacted on them. She’s in control of her own destiny, and she is battling through, but she is there alone.”
