SMALLVILLE Writers and WEDNESDAY Creators Talk About the Similarities Between Wednesday and Clark Kent

The Netflix series Wednesday was released just over a month ago to great critical and fan reviews, telling the individual story of Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega), the daughter in the famous Addams Family, who we’ve seen in movies and series for several decades. This was a fun, modern take on the timeless character, who is described by her onscreen mother (Catherine Zeta Jones) as her “little rain cloud.” We got to see the character go off to a boarding school for kids with other-worldly abilities as she tries to solve a mystery of her parents’ past. It was a very cool and fun series, and it was created by Smallville writers Al Gough and Miles Millar.

The pair recently sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about the series, and they ended up drawing some comparisons between Wednesday and their Smallville subject, Clark Kent. Millar said:

"Wednesday seems like a one-note character, and I've always found Clark Kent a one-note character. He's just sort of a goody, goody, and Wednesday's sort of just a snarky kid. So how do you, as a writer, take characters like those — kind of like extremes by the way — and then make them feel human? I think that really was our goal. Any writer's goal is to make characters that feel human and real and have emotional complexity. That's what is a fascinating journey as you begin to develop these stories and think about how did they become [the people they became]?" 

We went on to add:

"In Clark's case, how did he become the man he becomes, just a superhero, who is all about doing good for the world? And then Wednesday, the journey there is, we don't know where it's gonna go. No one's ever seen adult Wednesday. So that's really exciting in terms of like, we get to tell that story. How does she evolve into a woman, and how do you do that without diluting the essence of Wednesday? Her bandwidth of change, you never wanna change Wednesday too much. You wanna see her evolve, but she is a very particular kind of person, and we never want to change that."

It’s cool that they got to tell the Clark Kent origin story, and now they are getting to tell the evolution of Wednesday, who we’ve always known previously as a child. The series is great, and we are sure they are going to get a few more seasons to tell her story. Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.