By now just about everyone has seen the viral “Wednesday” dance. It’s the dance Jenna Ortega does in the hit Netflix series, “Wednesday” where we get a closer look at the eldest Addams Family child as she navigates the boarding school, Nevermore Academy.
The dance resembles the kind of moves a zombie might make, with a little extra rhythm, and it’s jumped off the small screen onto the even smaller screens of cellphones. It’s become a viral challenge on TikTok that even celebrities and athletes have joined in on. But Ortega recently revealed that she had no idea what the dance was going to look like until it was nearly time to shoot the scene.
Ortega stopped by “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and explained that she was tasked with choreographing the dance. The young star said director Tim Burton came to her about two days before the scene was to be shot and said, “Hey, Jenna, so I know you said that you wanted to choreograph this yourself. I know you got it. I know you’ve been working on it,” he ended by saying he trusted her. The only problem is … she in fact did not have it. She was not working on it.
Because her character, Wednesday, also fences and plays the cello, Ortega spent a lot of her free time learning to do those things, and choreographing the dance completely slipped her mind. She told Fallon her response to Burton that “it’s all so good,” when in reality she had “not gone over it at all.” Ortega admits that she was kicking herself for not working on the dance but she still had two days to figure it out.
And that’s exactly what she did because what she put together essentially took over the internet. Ortega said, “I’m not a dancer. I don’t do any of that. I have no experience in that field,” before she revealed that she didn’t sleep for two days while watching videos to prepare. That’s intense preparation but it was all worth it.
See the entire interview below and if you haven’t seen the original Wednesday dance, you can check that out below the interview.
Watch the original Wednesday dance below: