Gwendoline Christie is no stranger to appearing in franchises with huge fan bases and high expectations. The actress has been in everything from Game of Thrones to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and has managed to make each of her roles even within those larger tentpole projects feel distinctly her own.
Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to her role as the didactic and misunderstood Principle Weems in Netflix's Wednesday. However, what fans might not realize is that Christie actually turned to some very classical influences for her appearances in the first and second seasons of the series: the Hollywood starlets of Alfred Hitchcock’s films.
At the end of the first season of Wednesday, Principal Weems met a grisly end. In the second season, her position is filled by Steve Buscemi as Barry Dort, though her spirit lingers on in ways both metaphorical and quite literal.
Gwendoline Christie discusses her return to Wednesday
In the first episode of the recently released second half of this second season, Christie makes an unexpected return, as Weems in her ghostly form, though she is only able to be seen by a handful of primary characters in the show, such as Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Morticia.
As Christie herself said of the experience while chatting with Variety, “We all love being given a second chance.”
In returning to the series, Christie noted that while she was playing the same character, she was taking on a very different kind of role within the overarching story of the season. She revealed that her primary source of inspiration for Weems’s poise, posture, and ferociousness in the first season had been Tippe Hedren’s performance as Melanie Daniels in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
However, in this second season, she found inspiration in a different Hitchcock blonde: Kim Novak’s dual performance in Vertigo. In that film, Novak does play a ghost of sorts (it’s a long story, and not one you should have spoiled for you here if you’ve gone this long unaware of it), and in her ethereal, melancholic performance, Christie found pieces of her ghostly Weems.
What her preparation entailed
“Being able to view life carrying on without you would be an initially enthralling, but ultimately extremely painful experience,” Christie said. She took the role extremely seriously and wanted to bring pathos and gravitas to her performance. As such, her research took her to some unique places.
“I spent a lot of time around elderly people and people who were in liminal spaces. And I thought about the idea of ghosts, about what it means to be in a graveyard, and about the feeling of being haunted.”
“God, I always wanted to play a ghost,” Christie concluded. And while she may have come close to it a few times before, what with Captain Phasma’s numerous onscreen exits and reappearances, in Wednesday season 2, she finally gets her wish proper.
Both seasons of Wednesday are available to stream on Netflix.