Gwendoline Christie “felt beautiful on screen” for the first time ever in Wednesday

Gwendoline Christie is on a roll lately. Years after exploding onto the public stage as Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones, she’s played Lucifer in Netflix’s The Sandman and just recently starred as Larissa Weems in Wednesday, which came out just the other week and is already one of the streamer’s biggest hits.

And as she racks up more and more wins, Christie gets more freedom. When Wednesday director Tim Burton talked to her about playing Larissa, the principle of Nevermore Academy, he gave her a lot of freedom in how to shape the role. “He said, ‘You can do whatever you like with the character, feel free to make it whatever you want and we’ll keep talking about it,'” Christie told Entertainment Weekly. “And that was an unbelievable opportunity from this great cinematic master.”

"This idea kept coming to me of Larissa Weems being someone who was an outcast, who went to a school for outcasts, that was always second best and was always in Morticia’s [Catherine Zeta-Jones] shadow. What kept coming to me was this idea of this Hitchcock-style heroin, this screen siren, that maybe that young woman would look to our mystic portal, the cinema, to be an incarnation of her fantasies. And weirdly, Tim had exactly the same idea and so did Colleen Atwood."

Gwendoline Christie got to collaborate with legendary costume designer Colleen Atwood

Colleen Atwood is the costume designer on Wednesday. She’s pretty much a living legend in Hollywood, having won Oscars for her work in films like Chicago and Alice in Wonderland. You couldn’t ask for a better collaborator, and she came to play on Wednesday.

“The brilliance of Colleen is she is supremely talented. She’s also hugely experienced,” Christie said. “That experience cannot be underlined enough because she is able to look at your body and emphasize different elements, emphasize your strong points. The way she made me feel was my body felt celebrated and beautiful. Never once did I feel like there was something to hide or something to be ashamed of. She made me feel incredible. She was also enormously collaborative and wanted to know what I thought, which I was quite nervous initially to show her any references, but she welcomed them and she loved them.”

"It is the first time I’ve ever felt beautiful on screen. I cannot express my extreme gratitude more heartily to Tim and Colleen and our hair and makeup team. Colleen Atwood is rightfully a legend, and what she does is close to witchcraft in terms of transformation. It is an honor of my life to work with Colleen and to work with Tim."

On Game of Thrones, Christie was tasked with playing a woman who many other characters considered ungainly and non-feminine. It was always a bit of a Hollywood-style stretch to ask us to look at Christie and pretend she wasn’t a statuesque screen siren, but it more or less worked, given the framing. It’s great to hear that she got to feel more traditionally “beautiful” working on Wednesday, which you can stream now on Netflix!

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