Ortega reveals Wednesday’s senior year will bring brutal new questions about family, the future and what comes after Nevermore Academy.
ByBernadette Giacomazzo
August 11, 2026
Key Takeaways
- Jenna Ortega says Season 3 of Wednesday will follow the Nevermore kids into their senior year, focusing less on monsters and more on messy questions about family, adulthood, and what comes after high school.
- Family drama will intensify as Joanna Lumley’s Hester Frump becomes a series regular and Eva Green joins as Ophelia, deepening Morticia’s strained family history while Winona Ryder boards the show in a recurring role.
- Ortega says inhabiting Wednesday’s headspace sometimes bleeds into her own thinking, and she’s now prioritizing roles and stories she feels truly connected to, drawn to Wednesday’s unwavering sense of self.
Jenna Ortega is offering the clearest indication yet of where Wednesday is headed in Season 3—and Nevermore Academy’s students are about to face problems that have less to do with monsters and more to do with growing up.
Speaking with Esquire for its September 2026 Mavericks of Hollywood issue, Ortega said the Netflix hit will push Wednesday Addams and her classmates into a different stage of their lives as they enter their senior year of high school. That transition, she explained, will force the characters to confront questions about family, adulthood, and what comes after Nevermore.
“This season, especially because the kids are seniors in high school now, we’re dealing with more confrontational feelings regarding family and what it means to be an adult and what you see for your life,” Ortega said. “It’s not really until you get to the precipice of adulthood that you start to realize, Oh, God, well, maybe I’ve got to have a plan.”
Family already appears poised to play a major role in Wednesday Season 3. Joanna Lumley, who debuted last season as Wednesday’s wealthy grandmother Hester Frump, has been promoted to series regular. Season 2 ended with Hester entering the basement of her mansion, where her long-missing daughter Ophelia was being held in a locked cell. Eva Green will play Ophelia as a new series regular.
That setup gives Ortega’s comments about increasingly complicated family relationships added weight. Hester has a strained relationship with Morticia Addams, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, while the arrival of Ophelia expands a family history that has become increasingly important to the Netflix series.
Ortega also acknowledged that spending so much time inside Wednesday’s head has occasionally affected her own thinking.
“We mesh pretty well,” she said of the character. “But while I’m in production, going over scripts over and over again, and I’m there all day, every day, and in every scene…yeah, there’s times where I think like her. Maybe she peeks out a bit more, here and there.”
Ortega described Wednesday’s certainty about herself as one of the character’s defining qualities. “Wednesday is very aware of who she is, the world that she lives in and what she wants out of it,” she said. “Anytime anyone is just undeniably themselves, it’s quite magnetic.”
The expanding cast also includes returning stars Emma Myers, Hunter Doohan, Joy Sunday, Luis Guzmán, Isaac Ordonez and Fred Armisen, while Winona Ryder is joining Season 3 in a recurring guest role. Ryder’s appearance reunites her with Tim Burton and Ortega following Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Lumley, meanwhile, arrives as a full-time cast member after decades as one of British television’s most recognizable comedy stars. She is best known for playing the hard-living Patsy Stone opposite Jennifer Saunders’ Edina Monsoon in Absolutely Fabulous, the cult sitcom that began airing in 1992 and later spawned specials and a 2016 feature film.
Outside Wednesday, Ortega is already looking toward her own next chapter. She told Esquire that recent years have been an “experimental phase,” but her priorities are becoming clearer.
“Now it’s important to me to be focused on stories and characters that I feel truly connected to,” she said.
