Gwendoline Christie says playing Principal Larissa Weems in 'Wednesday' was the "first time she's ever felt beautiful" on screen.
Gwendoline Christie said her transformation was like 'witchcraft'
The 44-year-old actress portrays the Nevermore Academy head in the Netflix series based on the titular Addams Family character - who is played by Jenna Ortega - and she has thanked director Tim Burton and the hair and makeup team for making her feel good about her appearance.
She told Entertainment Weekly: “It is the first time I’ve ever felt beautiful on screen.
“I cannot express my extreme gratitude more heartily to Tim and Colleen and our hair and makeup team. Colleen Atwood [costume designer] is rightfully a legend, and what she does is close to witchcraft in terms of transformation.”
Weems is a former student who was roommates with Morticia Addams.
And Gwendoline, who was given the freedom to do "whatever she liked" with her character by Burton, said she saw her as an "outcast" who was always in "Morticia's "shadow" and a "Hitchcock-style heroin".
She explained: “This idea kept coming to me of Larissa Weems being someone who was an outcast, who went to a school for outcasts, that was always second best and was always in Morticia’s [Catherine Zeta-Jones] shadow.
“What kept coming to me was this idea of this Hitchcock-style heroin, this screen siren, that maybe that young woman would look to our mystic portal, the cinema, to be an incarnation of her fantasies.”
The only difference was her character is "in charge of her fate".
She went on: “We were looking at Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak.
“I wanted to push that idea. I like to transform into characters and people that are very far away from myself and I would never be cast as this part. It was an opportunity to create that and to inhabit that sort of impenetrable, imperious character with that classic idea of femininity.
“But whereas Hitchcock heroines tend to have all sorts of trauma being exacted upon them, for this to be a woman who was in charge of her own fate, who was ruthlessly ambitious and who was willingly putting herself into dangerous and extreme situations, was exciting to me."
She added: “Women in those movies would hold themselves with confidence and grace."
Tagged in Tim Burton Gwendoline Christie