Heading into the second season of Netflix’s “Addams Family” spinoff “Wednesday,” production designer Mark Scruton had a simple question for showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and executive producer/director Tim Burton: We created the world in Season 1. Now what?
“That was the first question I had when we sat down to get going on this season,” Scruton said, laughing. “We had to take a surprisingly successful show that everybody has seen and give them something new that doesn’t betray what you’ve done but keeps the story moving in the right direction.”
He received some unexpected help with the production’s move from Romania in Season 1 to Ireland in Season 2. “We got to revisit things,” he said, “And we weren’t tied to our sets from the first season, some of which we’d already destroyed. We could dig in and explore what worked, what didn’t work, what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to explore in a different way.”
Much of the new work focused on Willow Hill, a foreboding asylum rife with mysterious deaths and disappearances. The season was broken into two four-episode blocks, with the “If These Woes Could Talk” episode serving as a grand finale for the first block, and as a showcase for Willow Hill.
“We’d been dipping our toe into Willow Hill through the other episodes, but it came to a big crescendo in that episode,” said Scruton, who earned his second Emmy nomination (alongside supervising art director Shane McEnroe and set decorator David Morison) for “If These Woes Could Talk.”
The production found an abandoned seminary in Dublin, and Scruton’s team built entrance gates and transformed multiple levels into an ominous house of horrors that stands in contrast to Nevermore, the school that Wednesday Addams attends. “Willow Hill is a scary, terrifying place, in many ways the opposite of Nevermore, because Nevermore was bizarrely meant to be a quite warm, nurturing place,” he said. Parts of the asylum look benign, but it also contains dark hallways, forbidding cells and a laboratory in the basement where Wednesday discovers unspeakable experiments.
“We had to build the lab in the studio, mainly because we blew it up in the end,” Scruton said. “Otherwise, we would have built it at the location.”
He added, “I really like the scariness in the mundane. You could roam around and explore different levels, which was one of the joys of this job. We get to have a secret door behind a secret wall that leads down a spooky staircase into a secret chamber. Designing those sorts of things never gets old.”
He also embraced the idea of “dead tech,” littering the sets with forgotten machinery that hadn’t worked in years. “In a lot of locations, I built in weird conduits or electrical systems that were clearly defunct,” he said. An aviary was made to look like an 18th- or 19th-century Faraday cage used to block electromagnetic fields, while a four-level clock tower with a working lift was likewise jammed with decaying machines.
Of course, Season 2 didn’t skimp on some of the old “Wednesday” standbys. “We do love a gargoyle on the show,” he said with a laugh. “The bar keeps moving up every year when we do another fireplace or another gargoyle.”
Wednesday’s brother, Pugsley, has a fireplace inspired by Caliban’s cave in “The Tempest,” while the variety of creature designs used for gargoyles and grotesque sculptures kept growing. “We end up with a library of them,” he said. “There’s all sorts of different creatures on the walls, so it’s good to have a big catalog of that stuff up your sleeve.”
Additional designs:
The Willow Hill entrance
“We built the entrance gates and the main road in, because it gave us scope and a beautiful symmetry,” Scruton said of the asylum entrance. “You could drive through the gates, drive up to the front door, go inside and explore the different levels.”
The Clock Tower
“I don’t think people realize how much detail there is in the clock tower,” Scruton said of the space, which is one of his favorite creations. “There were four levels you could move through, with ladders and spiral staircases. It wasn’t the easiest set to shoot in, because it was very complicated. But we like environments where the actors can roam around.”
The Nevermore courtyard
The production’s move from Romania to Ireland forced the production design team to create a new Nevermore, the school that Wednesday attends. “The courtyard was a big new set,” Scruton said. “It was one of the first things I did. It had to be covered with gargoyles and rotten with that sort of world.”
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
