I’ve been catching up on the most recent season of “Wednesday,” Netflix’s hit adaptation of the beloved Charles Addams cartoon. In it, protagonist Wednesday Addams deals with some of the usual high school dramas — conflicts with friends, boys who may not be forthcoming about their true feelings — while also grappling with life or death battles with supernatural foes. Wednesday gets psychic visions of the future, and her world is populated with werewolves, fire starters, and sirens.
For the most part, the show is atmospheric fun, moody with a distinct affection for groan-worthy puns. But it also features a star-making turn from Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, whose affect is bone-dry yet always compelling.
It’s the type of performance that’s easy to take for granted; the show’s premise and any reasonably charismatic actress could have made “Wednesday” work. But this season featured a body-swap episode, in which Wednesday and her cheerful, emotive friend Enid (Emma Myers) briefly exchanged bodies due to some psychic shenanigans, and it proved a showcase for how much of an asset Ortega is for the show.
Suddenly, Wednesday is secretly Enid, which meant Ortega was doing a double performance: the generally much more high-energy Enid, but a version of Enid trying to tamp her natural exuberance down so that no one discovers the body swap has happened. Myers does a fine job with Wednesday-as-Enid, but it’s Ortega’s work that’s striking. Wednesday is usually stony-faced, but once Enid takes over her body, Ortega communicates multitudes by adding a layer of agitation to her energy and making ample use of her wide, expressive eyes to telegraph Enid’s panic. She even smiles, which is basically anathema for Wednesday, and it’s thanks to Ortega’s performance that a simple smile can look so unnatural.
This type of performance is always a fun way for a show to shake up its core dynamics by having a protagonist suddenly and dramatically behave in out of character ways. Many sci-fi and fantasy shows have used the trope. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” memorably swapped do-gooder Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and bad-girl Faith (Eliza Dushku), for instance, and “The Vampire Diaries” had doppelgänger characters, Elena and Katherine, both played by the same actress, Nina Dobrev.
The concept of the same face for multiple characters even forms the central premise of the show “Orphan Black,” about a group of women who discover they’re clones, all played by Tatiana Maslany. Maslany rightly won an Emmy for her work, in which clones were constantly pretending to be each other. When the show first aired, viewers shared gifsets of Maslany performing the same simple tasks (like lifting a glass) with completely different physicality each time to make the various clones instantly identifiable.
Wednesday’s spirit is safely back in her body by the end of the body swap episode, allowing the action to return to normal. But it served its purpose: giving the show’s action a little midseason zest, and reminding the audience of what an exciting talent Ortega is.
