[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers from Wednesday.]

From showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and director Tim Burton, the eight-episode Netflix original series Wednesday follows Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega), a teenaged Mistress of the Macabre who finds herself at Nevermore Academy, the boarding school that her parents, Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán), also attended. At the same time that she finds herself in the middle of a supernaturally infused murder mystery with a monster terrorizing the town, she’s trying to understand her own emerging psychic ability, in order to use it to her advantage in solving the crimes.

During this interview with Collider, executive producers Gough and Millar talked about why they wanted to explore Wednesday Addams deeper as a character, getting Burton on board, what most impressed them about Ortega and her pitch-perfect performance, giving Thing a personality, when they knew who the Hyde would be, how much they told Christina Ricci about her character to get her on board, how they knew whether their twists and misdirections were working, and whether they already know what a possible second season would look like.

Collider: How did this all come about? What did it start with? Did it start with wanting to do a new take on The Addams Family, or was it specifically Wednesday? What was it that really started the ball rolling on this show?

AL GOUGH: How do you get under the hood of an iconic character? In today’s IP-driven world, there really aren’t that many available. We always loved Wednesday because there’s a timelessness to Wednesday. She’s an old soul, but she appeals to young people, teenagers and older people. We wanted to tell a chapter that hadn’t been told before. We didn’t want to do a remake or a reboot. So, we came up with teenage Wednesday Addams in boarding school. We developed it and came up with a series bible, and then we had to track down who had the rights. We were like, “Does Paramount have the rights because they did the movie?” It was MGM because they were doing the animated movies. So, we brought it to them and to the Addams estate, and they really loved it. And then, we moved on from there.

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Image via Netflix

So, you tracked down who has the rights, you pitched this idea, and you got everybody interested. What was that initial pitch? What was the earliest idea that did get them interested and on board?

MILES MILLAR: It was the idea of centering a show on Wednesday, and a teenage Wednesday. You always see Wednesday as a 10-year-old girl, who gives the great zinger at the end of a scene. She’s an iconic character that people don’t really know anything about because she never evolved further than that, so it felt really intriguing for us to see. [Alfred Gough] and I both, we have four daughters between us, so we thought, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to see her as a teenager? What would she be like when she grows up?” That was really the instigation for the idea. It was, “What would Wednesday be like and how would she navigate the contemporary world?” And then, the next challenge was really wrestling with the idea of, should she be in a regular public school, or should she be somewhere that was more Addamsy? We’re taking her away from the Addams Family mansion, so how do we get that feeling of Addams family spookiness in the show that feels very specific to this world? We still wrestle with this idea. Is it too Harry Potter? We just thought it totally fit the vibe of Wednesday and the Addams Family, so we went for it, and we have really strived to make it feel different from Hogwarts. It’s very much an Addams Family version of what a boarding school for Wednesday would be like. It was a risk, but I think it turned out great.

Because she is such a specific character, does that make it easy to know if you’re veering too far off? Do you get a gut feeling when you go too far off of her personality?

GOUGH: Yeah, that was really the challenge. You want Wednesday to go through the story and have an emotional arc, and you want the audience to be with her because, on the surface, she could be a deeply unpleasant character. The thing is that Wednesday always had to be Wednesday, so it was a game of Operation. If you knew you were getting too close to the sides, you could bring it back in. That was definitely the challenge of the show.

You guys have said that you always wanted Tim Burton for this, and you felt like it was a match made in heaven. But taking into account that he had never done TV before, so there was no guarantee you’d actually get him for this, did you have a backup plan, if that didn’t work out?

MILLAR: Yeah, we always had lists of a lot of the directors and people that you’d want, but he was at the top of our list. We wanted to get him the script, and people thought we were insane. And then, he said yes, so it became a moot point. No one was more surprised than us. But then, speaking to Tim, the Addams Family and Wednesday, in particular, has been very meaningful to him and his work, and it was something that he loved as a kid. I think even the Lydia character in Beetlejuice has a Wednesday-like vibe. Something about this material really just appealed to him on a very deep level. That’s where it was a match made in heaven. He was our first date, and he said yes.

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Image via Netflix

Jenna Ortega is so fantastic in this. I can’t imagine anybody else doing this role. Obviously, you saw her in the audition and that must have impressed you enough to hire her, but while you were doing the shoot, what most impressed you about the work she was doing and how she was handling it all, in the moment, whatever got thrown at her?

GOUGH: It was a marathon. We were in Eastern Europe for eight months, and she’s in 95% of the show. It was about keeping the integrity of the character intact, and she had the way Wednesday walked, she would do things where she wasn’t blinking, and she had a ton of dialogue to memorize, as well. It was very impressive because it was a marathon. We would meet with her every morning and go through the scenes and talk about them, and then she’d talk about them with Tim. It was a lot of checking in, just to make sure that we’re keeping that character on track, because you’re also shooting episodes out of order. It was about tracking the story and the emotion of things. It was a lot, and she really handled it like a trooper.

MILLAR: Wednesday is a very difficult role because her motivations and her emotional point of view are not normal. That’s something that you always have to check yourself on. Even as writers, we had to check ourselves. We’d be like, “Well, that’s what a normal person would say. What would Wednesday say?” It was about always having to counter everything, in almost a contrarian way to what a normal person would think. That’s where the comedy comes from. She says something so out of whack that it’s funny because it’s so not what you normally think, but Wednesday would.

I love Thing. How did you guys figure out the best way to give him a personality, knowing that he can’t have any dialogue? What’s it like to figure out how to really make Thing a character?

MILLAR: That was one of the biggest risks we took, creatively. The idea that Thing would become Wednesday’s confidant, it was then about, how do we make that happen and make Thing feel like a sentient being who has emotions and all those elements that I think are actually very successfully visualized in the show. And Tim was very involved in that, as well.

It sounds crazy, but auditioning hands in Romania was not ideal. We went through a lot of people, and we eventually found this amazing guy, Victor Dorobantu, who’s a magician. His fingers are very dexterous because he does magic tricks and card tricks. And then, our visual effects supervisor spent maybe six weeks, every day, working and rehearsing and figuring out what a hand can do and how to get emotion. There’s a moment where he bows his allegiance to her, and it’s very subtle, but you really get a sense that he is a sentient being. One of the most emotional moments in the show is when Wednesdays returns and finds Thing stabbed to the column in her dorm room. It was a big risk because, at that point, you don’t want the audience to be like, “It’s just a hand, what’s the big deal? Why is she crying?” But it does work because it has such an emotional impact on her and the audience is watching that.

I gasped.

MILLAR: Yeah. It’s weird, right? But it was very much very intentional. A lot of time was spent making sure that he did feel like a real character and that the connection between the two of them was real.

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Image via Netflix

The Hyde and who the Hyde is, are questions that really run throughout the season, with some misdirections here and there. Did you always know who that would ultimately be? Was it always the character that it is? Had you thought of anyone else?

GOUGH: It was always gonna be Tyler. We had never done a closed mystery before, so we had the mystery worked out, and we wanted to make sure that, if went back and re-watched it, it played by the rules, through the whole thing, and it wasn’t something where it was like, “Oh, that person could have never been there.” And then, it was building in the misdirects, which was the hard part. You can build them in on the page, but then once you start shooting it, is it gonna become very obvious to people? That was the most nerve-wracking part of it, just to make sure that the mystery was actually gonna work.

Did you also tell the actor (Hunter Doohan), from the very beginning? Did he know what he was building up to?

GOUGH: We didn’t, initially. We had all the scripts written in advance, and we were trying to hold the last episode off from people, but ultimately they did find out. I think Hunter had an inkling that he was gonna be the monster, just intuitively, as an actor. It was the worst-kept secret on set, but thankfully, we were in Romania and there was nobody else to tell.

There’s also the twist with Marilyn Thornhill and how much she hates outcasts. Was that character always ultimately a villain, and was that also part of your pitch to Christina Ricci?

MILLAR: Yeah, absolutely. The idea of the two Wednesdays, mono y mono, in the crypt always felt irresistible to us to see. She’s such a sweet character that, to see her turn, it felt like a really good one. And then, to have Christina and Jenna in the same scene was irresistible. You had the mystery laid out of the whodunit, so the trick was really making sure we had enough misdirects and red herrings that people will think, “Oh, I know it’s this person,” and then go, “Oh, no, it’s not.” It’s just that satisfying element of a whodunit, when you really are taken by surprise, and we’ll see if people are. It’s one of those weird things, doing a show in a vacuum, where until you actually share it, you don’t know if it’s working. I’m intrigued to see and hear feedback from the audience.

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Image via Netflix

I loved it. I’m one of those people that feels like I have a pretty good sense of where things are going when I watch something, but this show kept me on my toes the whole time. That’s the biggest compliment that I can give you guys.

GOUGH: Oh, good. That’s great.

MILLAR: That’s amazing. My daughter has a similar quality. She watched it, and she didn’t know, and that was the biggest compliment she ever gave me. She said, “I didn’t know, Dad.” And she knows everything.

GOUGH: That’s when we knew. We were like, “Okay, we think the mystery worked,” when Miles’ daughter saw and couldn’t figure it out before that card drops.

So, is Weems really dead? If the show returns, are you going to need a new principal for Nevermore Academy?

GOUGH: To be determined.

You never know, when you don’t see an actual body somewhere.

MILLAR: That’s true.

GOUGH: Exactly.

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Image via Netflix

After wrapping things up with this mystery, at least for the most part, have you thought about where things would go next? Do you know what a Season 2 would look like? Do you know what the story is that you would want to tell?

GOUGH: Yes. When you’re first pitching the show, you wanna know that there are multiple seasons in it, so you wanna make sure that, whatever you’re doing, we’ve laid out what a potential Season 2 could look like. But then, you leave yourself open to see how people react to the first season, how they’re reacting to certain storylines, and how they’re reacting to certain characters. It’s a roadmap, where I know how to get there on the interstates, but there might be some fun back roads that we can explore, as well.

Wednesday is available to stream at Netflix.