Christina Ricci has a prominent role in Netflix’s Wednesday, but her character, Marilyn Thornhill, isn’t the nod to Wednesday Addams fans expect.
The following contains major spoilers for Wednesday Season 1, now streaming on Netflix.
The moment it was announced The Addams Family star Christina Ricci would have a role in Netflix’s Wednesday, fans were ecstatic. Not only did it make sense for Ricci to be a part of a show centered around a character she herself popularized in the 1990s, but it got fans speculating on what kind of character she would play. When fans got a tiny glimpse of Ricci’s character in the official trailer for Wednesday, it only sparked more curiosity.
Officially playing Marilyn Thornhill, it crossed many fans’ minds that Ricci would homage her version of Wednesday Addams. Fans were similarly intrigued by how Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and director Tim Burton would handle her passing of the torch to the show’s new Wednesday played by Jenna Ortega. After all, they’ve done this before with Smallville when they got former Lois Lane actor Margot Kidder and her Superman, Christopher Reeve to have guest appearances on the show. While Ricci’s Marylin Thornhill does call back to her own version of Wednesday through lines of dialogue with Ortega’s iteration, she also subverts expectations in ways that, ironically, make story sense.
Ricci’s Thornhill Is a Perfect Foil for Ortega’s Wednesday
Ricci’s Thornhill is introduced in Episode 1, “Wednesday’s Child is Full of Woe” after the titular heroine is expelled from her old school, having injured a fellow schoolmate by dumping piranhas in the school swimming pool. Known for her gothic appearance and her macabre interests, Wednesday Addams is transferred to her parents’ alma mater, Nevermore Academy, where she meets a handful of colorful outcasts. One of those is Marilyn Thornhill, the perky instructor who specializes in various deadly plants. She’s one of the first to happily welcome Wednesday to the school and even offers her a gift she knew she would enjoy: a black dahlia, almost as if she could read the young Addams girl’s mind.
Throughout the series, Thornhill is depicted as being surprisingly tolerant of Wednesday’s cynical view of the world, her brutal honesty, and her staunch defiance of authority. She’s even shown to be highly supportive of Wednesday, even when her own boss, Larissa Weems (played by The Sandman’s Gwendoline Christie) suspects her of causing trouble. There are even times when Thornhill attempts to bond with Wednesday, most notably in the school library where she admits that she is a special kind of outcast: too weird for the town “normies,” and not weird enough for Nevermore’s outcasts. As such, she never truly fit in anywhere, which is a subtle nod to Ricci’s own Wednesday.
Of course, like everything else that happens in the world of Wednesday Addams, nothing is ever quite what it seems, and Thornhill is no exception. When Wednesday becomes mixed up in a murder mystery at Nevermore, she quickly learns that Thornhill had been pulling her strings the whole time she’s been there. Not only is Thornhill revealed to be the mastermind behind the murders happening around the town of Jericho, but she’s even revealed to be the missing Laurel Gates, an aristocrat who was previously presumed dead.
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Ricci’s Thornhill Is a Twisted Inversion of Wednesday
The way Ricci’s Thornhill is revealed to be the villainous Laurel Gates is pretty ingenious, especially for the way she inverts her own version of Wednesday. Like Ricci’s former character, Laurel comes from a wealthy family, and is shown to be her own brand of weird. Not only does she have a penchant for deadly carnivorous plants like DC Comics’ Poison Ivy, but she’s also shown to live in her family’s dilapidated mansion and is not scared of monsters. In fact, she’s shown to be manipulating a supernatural creature known as a Hyde to carry out her murders.
Laurel is also shown to be highly intelligent and calculating, fully capable of cooking up deadly schemes and covering her tracks in ways that manage to elude the meticulous Wednesday Addams — a detail that impresses the gothic teenager. Wednesday even managed to miss the link between Thornhill’s love of plants and the fact that Laurel is herself named after a tree, which should’ve been a major clue to her real identity. Laurel is also an expert in the occult, as evidenced by her ability to resurrect her ancestor, Joseph Crackstone, from the dead. With all that Laurel has going for her, she could be easily thought of as an evil version of Wednesday who truly succumbed to her darkness. Where Laurel differs from Wednesday, however, is that the former is clearly on the wrong side of history.
Laurel’s villainous motivations come from a place of embracing settler colonialism — an ironic twist considering that Ricci’s Wednesday actively rejected it in Addams Family Values. Interestingly, the ironic twist works for one reason: Laurel upholds a dark mirror to the kind of person Wednesday herself would be if she didn’t have empathy for others. As much as Wednesday prides herself in scaring people with her homicidal tendencies, the truth is she’s a much kinder person than she’d rather believe herself to be. Not only does she seek justice for her classmates, but she’s a tenacious opponent of settler colonialism. As the kind of person who openly rejects colonization by torching monuments devoted to history’s villains, this makes Laurel the perfect nemesis for Ortega’s Wednesday: she induces the latter’s character growth by reminding her that being weird doesn’t mean lacking a moral compass.
