Chris Bacon didn’t walk into Wednesday without a clear creative direction. The composer elaborated on Deadline’s Sound & Screen Television awards-season concert event. There he shared the first and most important piece of advice Tim Burton gave him.
“One of the very first things that Tim [Burton] said when we started was ‘don’t make this funny,'”
Bacon told the panel
Tim Burton was very straightforward about it. “It’s a funny show,” Bacon explained said, “but Tim Burton, he was very serious: ‘Do not play funny music.’ Play them serious.”
“The same way Jenna Ortega plays it,”
“That makes it funnier if it’s darker, heavier, more serious. Keep it grounded in that macabre fantasy world.”
Bacon
That translated into the Season two score, Bacon said. “Season 2 was a chance to take what we started in Season 1 and create this language that was quirky but also not too quirky that felt like it could have existed at any time,” he said, noting that the Addams Family “doesn’t exist in time.”
Key Moments
With moments like a monster mom finding her monster son. Bacon said, We wanted “a chance to do more and be unabashedly thematic,” and went all-in on a sweeping, cinematic score with French horn when Enid (sorry Emma Myers) turns into a werewolf and saves Wednesday.
Bacon did not work alone on the series from the start. In December 2021, longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman joined to compose the original theme and co-compose the score alongside Bacon. Bacon ultimately scored the final four episodes on his own.
The harpsichord remained a key part of the sound, rooted in the original 1964 TV series theme. Bacon himself quips it is an instrument he “hated my entire life,” but acknowledged, “It’s part of their sound and it’s part of what keeps the Addams Family timeless.”
Season 3 of Wednesday began production in Ireland at the end of February. Adding Chris Sarandon, Noah Taylor, Oscar Morgan, Kennedy Moyer, and Winona Ryder to the cast. On what the new score might sound like, Bacon kept it brief: “Music is being made.”
