Gwendoline Christie says her new Wednesday role is first time she's felt 'beautiful on screen'
Gwendoline Christie has said that her role in new series Wednesday is the first time she's felt 'beautiful on screen'.
The Netflix show is a reimagining of The Addams Family, centred around the titular eldest child.
Game of Thrones star Christie takes on the role of Larissa Weems, the principal of Nevermore Academy, and director Tim Burton gave her the freedom to help mould the character as she wished.
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She told Entertainment Weekly: "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.'
"And that was an unbelievable opportunity from this great cinematic master."
She worked with Burton and costume designer Colleen Atwood to create the character, and this collaboration culminated in a career first for the 44-year-old.
"It is the first time I've ever felt beautiful on screen," Christie said.
"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 honour of my life to work with Colleen and to work with Tim."
The Star Wars actor continued: "The brilliance of Colleen is she is supremely talented. She's also hugely experienced.
"That experience cannot be underlined enough because she is able to look at your body and emphasise different elements, emphasise 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."
Indeed, it seems the trio were in harmony when it came to their vision for Larissa.
"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," she said.
"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."
The eight-part series is currently the top show on Netflix in the UK - though some viewers have claimed Netflix 'queer-baited' them into watching it.
The synopsis reads: "The series is a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams' years as a student at Nevermore Academy.
"Wednesday's attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorised the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago — all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore."
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV
Jake Massey