What The Addams Family Cast Should Really Look Like

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky — in fact, for nearly 30 years they didn't have first names. Cartoonist Charles Addams drew the first "Addams Family" comic for a 1938 issue of The New Yorker. That first comic was a one-panel gag about a friendly vacuum cleaner salesman showing his wares to a sinister-looking woman dressed in black and a hulking, bearded man as bats fly around their cobweb-infested home. Throughout the 1940s and '50s, Addams would return to this strange, macabre family, refining them over nearly 60 comics into a familiar cast. These characters included the sleepy-eyed father, a slinky vampiric mother, a devilish little boy, a melancholic little girl, a witchy grandmother, and a corpse-like uncle. Still, it wasn't until ABC developed a live-action "The Addams Family" sitcom in 1964 that Addams actually gave names to his creations.

The television series, starring John Astin and Carolyn Jones as the newly-christened Gomez and Morticia Addams, lasted just two seasons but spent decades spent playing in syndication. This longevity — coupled with quite possibly the world's catchiest theme song — kept the altogether ooky clan in the public eye. In 1991, Paramount Pictures released a hit feature film adaptation starring Raul Julia as Gomez, Anjelica Huston as Morticia, and Christopher Lloyd as an impostor Uncle Fester. 

Director Barry Sonnenfeld looked to Addams' original cartoons for inspiration, directly recreating famous gags like the Addams pouring hot oil on Christmas carolers in the film. Let's take a look at how Sonnenfeld's version of the Addams family compared to Addams' original designs.

Where Gomez's look has proven to be malleable over the years, there is but one aesthetic for his beloved wife Morticia. Even in that very first comic from 1938, Morticia's style and overall vibe were in place. There, she wears her iconic long black dress, form-fitting and low-cut with her jet-black hair parted down the middle framing dark, sultry eyes on a pale face. 

In the 1964 series Carolyn Jones was practically the cartoon brought to life, and other than a bright pop of red on her lips, Anjelica Huston's take on the character is remarkably similar. "Wednesday" also knows not to mess with a good thing. Its Morticia, Catherine Zeta-Jones, looks no different from Huston or Jones. Why should she? It's an instantly recognizable look, spooky and seductive all at the same time. Perhaps not coincidentally, all three of Charles Addams' wives had a particularly "Morticia" look about them.

Like Gomez, the "joke" of Morticia is that she is not very much different from any other wife and mother. She keeps her children in line, makes sure Wednesday plays with her food, and prides herself on the home she's made. When she sees that Fester has packed a bottle of cyanide for his stay with the Addams, she smiles gently. "Fester..." she says, "as if we'd run out." Sonnenfeld shoots Huston's close-ups with a noir-ish shaft of light across her eyes, no matter what the rest of the scene looks like, and her potent chemistry with Juliá inspired a viral joke in 2020 that many fans took at face value.

With his fair hair, stocky frame, and smiling face, Pugsley is the all-American boy — except for the fact that Pugsley's smile is usually seen after he is done cutting down road signs and throwing extra logs on the fire for Santa on Christmas Eve. In Addams' cartoons and the 1964 series (where he was played by Ken Weatherwax), Pugsley is the instigator, a malevolent sprite who builds toy guillotines and has a menagerie of strange and deadly pets. His talent with explosives is always getting him into one kind of trouble or another, but to Gomez and Morticia this was just good old-fashioned fun, a bit of mischief on the way to growing up.

The film Pugsley's famous striped shirt and some of his best-known habits — he still makes the roads around the Addams home dangerous by cutting down stop signs and the like — are carried over from earlier iterations of the character. However, Pugsley's overall role in the 1991 film is diminished in favor of Wednesday, who has a much more substantive part. As played by Jimmy Workman, Pugsley is a cheerful boy who seems happy just to be included in his sister's games, even when that game involves strapping him into an electric chair or shooting at him with crossbows.

In another case of the Addams' malleable family tree, Granny (or Grandmama) started as an elderly member of the Addams clan. With a wild shock of white hair and a long witch's nose, she was someone's grandmother, though it was not clear exactly whose. For the 1964 series, she was established as Gomez's mother, Grandmama, and played by Marie Blake. Morticia's mother, Grandma Frump, was a separate, much sterner, character than Grandmama who appeared just a handful of times on the series, portrayed by the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton.

Judith Malina, the co-founder of the experimental troupe The Living Theatre, played Granny in the 1991 film as a hybrid of the two characters. She has all of the traits of Grandmama Addams, from her appearance to her eccentric cooking style to her facility with spells and seances, but here she is Morticia's mother, not Gomez's. Malina played Granny in the first film but did not return for "Addams Family Values." There, Carol Kane, under layers of old age makeup and prosthetics, stepped into the role. 

The 2019 animated adaptation separated the grandmothers into separate characters once again, with Bette Midler voicing Grandmama (mother to Gomez and Fester) and Catherine O'Hara as Morticia's mother Granny Frump.

Thing, the disembodied hand that serves as the family's gofer, assistant, and overall factotum, was not a part of Addams' original comics, other than a single gag that features a sign outside the Addams mansion reading "Beware of the Thing." Thing (or Thing T. Thing, his full name) as we know and love him was developed for the 1964 series and played by Lurch actor Ted Cassidy most of the time, although when Lurch and Thing had to be in a scene together, a member of the crew would lend a hand, so to speak. Thing would appear out from various boxes in every room of the mansion, usually just a hand and wrist, but every so often he would grow nearly an entire forearm if the situation required.

Visual effects had improved significantly by 1991, and Sonnenfeld's most lasting change to any of the characters is arguably freeing Thing from his box and letting him roam free, crawling on his fingertips like a five-legged spider. Actor and magician Christopher Hart played the helpful appendage through a combination of optical effects, animatronics, and good old-fashioned sticking your hand through a hole in the table. 

Hart played the role in both Sonnenfeld films and "Addams Family Reunion," and every depiction of Thing in the years since has walked in his fingersteps. Once freed from the box, he would never go back.