Inside Wednesday Season 2 Going K-Pop with New Dances

This article contains Wednesday Season 2 spoilers.

There is something incredibly sneaky about that first dance sequence in Wednesday’s second season. After showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar swore for months that they would not try to replicate the viral sensation from the show’s freshman year—back when Jenna Ortega’s titular character vamped across a ballroom to the Cramps (or Lady Gaga, depending on your social post)—the back half of Wednesday Season 2 not-so-much reverses that promise as it absolutely inverts it with a cold-open more colorful than a Skittles rainbow, and twice as sugary). Rather than see Wednesday do her macabre moves again, episode six opens with Ortega and co-star Emma Myers apparently switching roles for the lulz.

In plentiful pinks and pastels, Ortega’s seeming Wednesday Addams is smiling and dancing to K-pop. Like a Huntr/x super-fan at a Demon Hunters sing-along, Ortega trades in Addams Family formality for giddy exuberance while busting a move to BlackPink around the Nevermore campus. But in the voiceover, it is now Myers’ Enid Sinclair who finally gets to narrate, telling us that “it’s the Wednesday Addams you never knew you needed!”

It is also the Wednesday Addams who’s introducing viewers to the first of two highly choreographed dance sequences mapped to Enid’s eccentric sensibility. And for the new season’s choreographer Corey Baker, it was a delicious irony and opportunity.

“There was this moment on set where Tim, myself, and Jenna were on this sort of stage area filming the dance taking place,” Baker says when we catch up with the professional hoofer between Wednesday episode drops. “We were watching all the crowd, and the choreography take place, and I just turned to Jenna and I said, ‘You know, this is your fault.’ And she turned back and smiled.”

It’s true that both dance sequences poised to light up IG reels and YouTube re-edits for months to come are born out of a desire to subvert “Bloody Mary” expectations. Yet both sequences are meant to be something wholly unique.

“The brief from the get-go was to ignore the season one dance,” Baker explains. “Don’t even pay homage to it. Let it go. Let’s build something completely new that feels really relevant for these characters that services the plot in this new way. So that was really exciting as a choreographer.”

Audiences had seen Wednesday moves across a dance floor like a cadaver possessed, but both moments in season two, one performed by Ortega and the other by Myers, were a chance for the actresses and their choreographer to get inside Enid’s technicolor head.

“Wednesday is really [grounded] in the gut,” the choreographer says. “Her every muscle is almost engaged, yet then completely relaxed. It’s a weird sort of dichotomy of Wednesday, one that you can’t explain, which is exactly why it’s just so compelling to watch. Whereas Enid feels to me like the embodiment of a sort of ADHD. Everything moves and everything’s shiny. Yet there is this real sort of intellect and sort of darkness in her as well.”

For Baker it would mark a chance to work a second time with Ortega and Burton, both of whom the 35-year-old choreographer collaborated with on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice during the sequence where the Wednesday star joined Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, and Winona Ryder in an epic lip-synching of Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park.” In Wednesday, Baker was less hands-on in Ortega’s big moment of K-popping around Nevermore, although he did devise some basic moves while recording on his own camera for Gough, Millar, and Burton’s approval. But after Ortega self-choreographed Goth curious kids’ favorite party trick of Halloween 2022, she still had a hand in that particular big moment, including the bit where Jenna-as-Wednesday-as-Enid pulls on her own pigtails.

“That was all Jenna and Tim, and I have to say that there’s not many people out there that can not feel vulnerable doing that kind of thing, and Jenna, she’s  got a superpower like that.”

The sequence is also informed by both lead actors’ familiarity with each other, as well as the physical work Baker and company did in figuring out Enid’s own physical reference points.

“Working with Emma a lot, she built this sort of vocabulary up, of which I think we riffed on,” Baker explains. He also later notes, “Those two are just such good friends in real life, and they know each other so well that it’s just second nature for them. And they’re incredible actors and movers in their own right, of course. So those ingredients are already there and they just absolutely smash it.”

Perhaps the bigger testament to this, then, was the sequence Baker spent days and weeks developing with Myers as well as co-star Evie Templeton, which the choreographer admits they viewed as the spiritual heir to the season one moment.

“It’s like a full-on number, and we’re all really proud of it,” Baker says. “We created it over a few weeks, myself and some dancers I normally workshop with, and then got some feedback from Tim and Miles and Al, and then sort of took it to Emma and Evie, who learned it in probably around five days. You know, half a day here, half a day there, either individually or together.”

Like Enid, the sequence is also always on the verge of transforming into something evermore fabulous.

Says the choreographer, “We really thought, ‘How does this character move? What does she look like dancing?’ That’s why I think the dance isn’t one style at all, it’s a mismatch of things. It’s got ballet, it’s got contemporary, it’s got jazz, it’s got stunts, it’s got everything in it. And I think that sort of speaks to who she is.”

The only note Baker got ahead of time from Burton—who also directed the penultimate season two episode where Enid and Agnes bury their differences on the dance floor—was that it absolutely “can’t be Broadway.” To Baker that meant nothing too polished or “hyper-performative,” which is a shame for the former theater kid. (But hey, perhaps Enid or Wednesday could pick up a penchant for musicals in season 2? What, you think an Addams wouldn’t like the bloodletting vengeance of Sweeney Todd?)

But as a consequence of the note, Baker got to develop something that he thinks solves “the conundrum” of Enid. 

“She’s just gonna do whatever brings her joy in terms of movement,” he says. “She’s probably seen lots of it and pulled from different things, and that’s how we get this weird series of movements that you probably would never see anywhere else.”

That goes all the way down to the K-pop infusion in season two—an influence that even saw Thing getting in on the action. The irascible severed appendage has proven to have the heart of a golden retriever, especially for Enid making him as much a Sinclair family pet as an Addams one. And when it came to the big dance scene in the second season, Baker worked with Thing performer Victor Dorobantu for the character’s white-knuckled choreography.

“When I created the dance and filmed it, I actually filmed like a cutaway of my hand doing some of the movements to make it match,” says Baker. “I then sent that to Tim and Al and Miles, and I think when they saw that they were like, ‘This is great, let’s have a moment of Thing dancing,’” Baker smiles. “I think it just brings a lot of fun.”

Woe unto those tasked with upping the moves in season three.