The 'Wednesday' Dance Move By Jenna Ortega Goes Viral On Social Media

23/11/2022

The Addams Family is a group of fictional characters, known for their satirical and eccentric persona, wealthy, but are delighted to macabre and are unaware that people find them bizarre or frightening.

And this time, Netflix has released the whole eight episodes of Wednesday, which is an coming-of-age supernatural comedy horror television series, centered on the character Wednesday, the daughter in the Addams Family.

While the character is better known as a girl in her early teenage years, Wednesday in the Netflix's series is at her late teens, attending Nevermore Academy, the eerie institute that serves as a home for society’s outsiders and outcasts.

Wednesday in the Netflix series retains her usual sarcastic personality, her pale skin and braided pigtails. She is still obsessed with death, lacks the emotion, and always dresses in black. She even redecorated half of the room she stayed to be black and white, because she hates the colorful decorations her werewolf roommate has.

And in the fourth episode in the series, Wednesday attends a 'Rave'N Dance' dance at her school, wearing all black like usual, but danced mesmerizingly.

Choreographed by Jenna Ortega, the star of Wednesday, social media users are instantly awed.

While the series receive mixed reviews, and the show itself may certainly have its narrative and critical flaws, but many praised Jenna Ortega and how the young celebrity portrayed the character in all her noir-sleuthing glory, gothic style.

Ortega’s performance as the titular Wednesday Addams is the series; biggest selling point and its strongest critical feature.

After all, the series centers on the character, and Ortega managed to hypnotize in her performance.

Ortega is praised for her deadpan delivery and impassive expressions, and managed to make Wednesday become the goth icon she should have been long ago.

It is said Ortega was inspired by the dance move by Lisa Loring, the first person who portrayed Wednesday Addams in the original 1964 TV series The Addams Family.

"I choreographed that myself and I think it’s very obvious that I’m not a dancer or choreographer," she said, laughing.

Ortega’s choreography doesn’t just pay homage to Wednesday’s previous moves, because she improvised it by making the moves stiff and rather jilting, with an added swing.

She also added elements of Wednesday's mother Morticia and father Gomez who made a tango move in the 1993 Addams Family Values film. Ortega's jerks and contorts were also inspired from her research on goth and counterculture dance scenes.

"I just pulled inspiration from videos of goth kids dancing in clubs in the ’80s… Lene Lovich music videos, Siouxsie and the Banshees performances, and Fosse," said Ortega in an interview, adding that she only planned the moves a few days before Director Tim Burton filmed the sequence

In the many The Addams Family films and series, Wednesday is often shown to be the only Addams family member who is genuinely mean-spirited, as opposed to simply having a fascination with macabre.

But Ortega's move, paired with the charisma Ortega portrayed in the previous three episodes, and with the choice of her black tulle gown and the blue light on the dance floor, Director Tim Burton is able to show the liveliness of the the Wednesday character, despite her known dark persona.

While many considers Ortega's dance "awkward," others see it mesmerizing and beautiful as it is unique.

The internet apparently loves it.

On TikTok, many users have started replicating Ortega's move, and created a trend of doing the dance move themselves and posting about it.

While Wednesday was an instant hit, and many praised Ortega for her role, Ortega isn't really confident about the whole thing.

"I actually felt really insecure about this," she said when she was asked to react to the scene.

Besides Ortega's dance, another thing that went viral, was Ortega's makeup.

Many people on TikTok started copying her lop color, face makeup, and eyeshadow.

Besides Ortega, there is one character in the series that caught the internet's sensation, is Thing, the disembodied hand companion. In the series, it is played by the right hand of Christopher Hart.

It didn't take long until Wednesday overtakes Stranger Things ratings, according to Netflix.

The series had the biggest ever debut week on Netflix for an English language series, also according to Netflix, saying that Wednesday was number one in 83 countries, with an estimated 50 million households worldwide watching at least part of the series.

The Addams Family spin-off, which was originally made famous by Christina Ricci in 1991, racked up 341.2 million hours of viewing worldwide in its first week.

This tops the 335 million hours that Stranger Things season 4 had when it debuted.

However, it's worth noting that both Wednesday and Stranger Things couldn't compare to Squid Games. The series is still holding the award for all-time highest views on Netflix, with over 570 million hours viewed at its peak in a week.

The South Korean phenomenon also had two other weeks where it went above 400 million hours.