Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn’t need a crystal ball to know what she has in common with Morticia Addams.
While the Wednesday actress—who shares kids Dylan, 25, and Carys, 22, with husband Michael Douglas—may not eat insect-infested cookies in real life or share the same morbid preferences, she does understand her as a mother.
“There are many times I’ve been thinking I’m putting an old head on young shoulders when my daughter or my son has done something,” Catherine explained to TODAY.com in an interview published Aug. 26. “Sometimes you have to let step back and let them just do that in parenting.”
Indeed, as Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) returns to Nevermore Academy while trying to manage her psychic abilities, her mother—who also shares a son Pugsley Addams (Isaac Ordonez) with her husband, Gomez Addams (Luis Guzmán)—struggles to connect with her.
“There’s a part of Morticia that wants Wednesday to be exactly how she is,” she explained. “There’s a strength to this young woman. She has all the outcast attributes and the abilities that are part of Morticia’s world, but there’s a defiance that Morticia never had that Wednesday has.”
Although the creepy and kooky clan shares supernatural powers, like Pugsley and Uncle Fester’s electrokinesis, they’re bond is human as ever.
“It was really important to Tim Burton, when making this adaptation of the Addams family, that they still felt like real people,” Catherine, 55, said of the executive producer. “He wanted there to be a tether and a groundedness to the real world.”
In a true teenage daughter fashion, Wednesday—who had overexerted herself from using her psychic ability with a spellbook that Morticia took—learned the hard way that her mother may be right sometimes.
“She loses it in the sword fight with Morticia,” show co-creator Miles Millar told Variety earlier this month of the spellbook. “She goes into that thinking she’s going to easily defeat her mother, which she gets wrong, because Morticia is an expert swordmaster.”
Jonathan Hession/Netflix
For co-creator Alfred Gough, Wednesday gave viewers a look into “an untold chapter” of the family.
“Our philosophy was they can be a family that loves each other, but it doesn’t mean that they’re a family that doesn’t have conflict,” he told the outlet. “That gives us great drama, but also deepens the relationships and makes them feel like a real family.”
Fans even get a glimpse at Moriticia’s complicated relationship with her mother Hester Frump (Joanna Lumley), a wealthy mortuary mogul, which juxtaposes hers and Wednesday’s.
“You also see Morticia’s relationship with her mother, and her mother was a very different mother than Morticia is,” he explained. “She was a working mom all about her job, and Morticia, in a way, is trying to go against that.”