Gwendoline Christie on Playing Ghost Weems in ‘Wednesday’ Season 2

To get back into character as Weems, Christie spent lots of time thinking about second chances, fate and the dead. She says: “I spent a lot of time around elderly people and people who were in liminal spaces. And I thought a lot about the idea of ghosts, about what it means to be in a graveyard, and about the feeling of being haunted.”

She also cites two Hitchcock blondes as crucial inspirations for Weems, noting that her living incarnation in Season 1 was inspired by Tippi Hedren in “The Birds,” whereas the character evolved in Season 2 to be more like Kim Novak in “Vertigo” — “the woman who comes back from the dead,” as Christie calls her. Accordingly, even beyond the grave, Weems carries herself with the poise of an old Hollywood starlet, but with something ghostly underneath.

The ghostly feeling was accentuated by the fact that Weems couldn’t interact with anyone except the defiant Wednesday and her lifelong enemy Morticia. The dynamic “gave a great energy to this overriding feeling of alienation and isolation and deep, almost painful and eternal solitude,” according to Christie. Nevertheless, she relished in the unique acting experience, saying “I found it a blessed relief, because I spend my life wanting to be invisible or someone else” and “it helped no end with the character. I loved it because I’d never experienced anything like that before. I never played a character that’s totally ignored in that way.

“God, I always wanted to play a ghost,” she says.

Despite the general isolation, Christie was able to share distinctive dialogues with her co-stars playing the few characters who could see Weems. This short list included Ortega as Wednesday, Zeta-Jones as Morticia and Emma Myers as Enid Sinclair in a wacky episode where she and Wednesday switch bodies. Christie celebrated all of her castmates’ performances, noting that “it is a specific experience with each character” depending on their relationship to Weems. She particularly enjoyed playing “the reluctant mentor” to Wednesday, as the two characters have what she calls “a begrudging mutual respect” for one another that feels “unclassifiable.”

The odd relationship aside, Weems does help Wednesday defeat her enemies and resolve her conflicts by the end of Season 2. In the meantime, she also enjoys seeing her successor, Steve Buccemi’s principal Dort, removed from Nevermore and elevating her legacy by comparison. As her ghost sits at her old desk, she pridefully states that the school needs “a steady hand on the rudder, a leader of impeccable moral character.” Even though Weems is dead to everyone but Wednesday, it seems as if she is talking about herself — and Christie agrees. “I think Larissa is absolutely referring to herself,” she says, “I think that Larissa Weems realizes that she has given her life for that school and that she wants to come back.”

Though the principal position remains unfilled at the end of Season 2, Weems’ limited ability to interact with anyone beyond Wednesday and Morticia might not make her a prime candidate for the job. Then again, “Wednesday” takes place in a world of werewolves, monsters, and zombies, so a ghost principal maybe isn’t the most outlandish prediction for Season 3.