I love The Addams Family. I wonder how this one will take off. I think if they do a spinoff on one character, they should also do backstories on others. That'd be interesting as well.
Netflix's Wednesday cast an expert card trick magician as Thing to ensure the severed hand's movements would be dexterous and convincing.
Showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar spoke to Variety about the process of casting Thing. "Thing is so unique to the Addams Family that we thought we couldn’t have an Addams version of the world you're exploring [without] Thing in there," Gough said. "It's easy to write it on the page. To actually translate that on the screen, we found an actor who's a close-hand magician." Millar continued, explaining that the actor, Victor Dorobantu, is "a Romanian magician who does card tricks, basically. So he has incredible dexterity." Thing plays a prominent role on Wednesday, giving Dorobantu's performance significant importance.
Millar added that director Tim Burton was "very, very involved" in the process of bringing Thing to life, as Burton "was sort of obsessed with Thing." A great deal of time was spent practicing sign language, and there was "actually an old Romanian puppet theater from Romanian TV shows with puppets" on the set. Dorobantu would use the puppet theater to rehearse Thing's movements, then analyze the results on video. "So it was really intricate and very intentional in terms of making him feel bizarrely complex and real," Millar said.
I have seen so much of this show going around TikTok that I will admit I am interested in watching it but at the moment I do not have a Netflix subscription at the moment. I am hoping to watch it as soon as I am able to as it seems it was quite a hit.