Wednesday Fans Should Check Out Eva Green in Penny Dreadful Now

The Wednesday casting department just does not miss. After featuring former Wednesday Addams, Christina Ricci, as well as former Doctor Who companion Billie Piper, and Game of Thrones alum Gwendoline Christie, the series is set to add another iconic genre actress to its ranks: Eva Green. The star of such projects as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Dark Shadows, and Camelot, Green has made a name for herself playing complex, strange, and even slightly unhinged roles, a talent that will almost certainly come in handy on this show. (Which, as we all know, is full to bursting with precisely those sorts of characters.) 

Green will be taking on the role of Ophelia Frump, the troubled Addams Family member seen only from the back in Wednesday’s season 2 finale. Morticia’s missing sister and a Raven like her niece, Ophelia was committed to Willow Hill Psychiatric Hospital before vanishing completely. But if the final moments of the season are anything to go by, she’s likely much closer (and more dangerous) than anyone thinks. Green will undoubtedly be excellent in the part — who isn’t already contemplating the fun of her facing off with Joanna Lumley and Catherine Zeta Jones? — but if you want to see the true extent of what she’s capable of as an actress, you don’t have to wait for Wednesday season 3 to arrive. 

Green also starred in Penny Dreadful, an indulgent, atmospheric Gothic horror series that ran for three seasons on Showtime and never really received the more widespread public acclaim it deserved. A fascinating depiction of dark literary characters brought to weird and terrible life in a beautifully bleak Victorian London, Penny Dreadful is nothing if not unique. It’s the sort of risky, genre-defying prestige show that was all the rage in the early 2010s, when it felt like anything was possible in the world of entertainment. And it’s something Wednesday fans — or anyone who loved Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — needs to put on their to-watch list immediately. 

Green stars as Vanessa Ives, a deeply religious clairvoyant at constant war with her own internal darkness. And while her story begins as a sort of supernatural team-up mystery — Vanessa joins forces with a retired explorer (Timothy Dalton) and an American sharpshooter (Josh Hartnett) to track a bizarre creature and a missing girl — it ultimately evolves into something much creepier and more complicated.

Over the course of its three season run, the show went on to add over a half dozen characters from across classic literature to its narrative, including Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), his Creature (Rory Kinnear), Dr. Henry Jekyll (Shazad Latif), Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), an assortment of figures from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a consumptive sex worker named Brona Croft, who ultimately transforms into a sort of Bride of Frankenstein-esque figure and is played by Green’s soon-to-be Wednesday co-star Piper. 

Its story is… well, let’s just call it deeply strange, wrestling with questions of love, faith, death, rebirth, and power even as it drips with Gothic decadence and existential dread. Allowing all its characters — even its purported heroine — to fully embrace their darkest selves, it makes for incredibly compelling viewing, and Green’s performance is a major reason why.

Her Vanessa is a deeply tortured, conflicted soul, constantly yearning and self-flagellating as she is possessed, institutionalized, and tortured, both physically and psychologically. Fueled by both extensive emotional trauma and a seemingly bottomless rage, Green gets the chance to be messy and vulnerable as often as she is steely and righteous, and the show refuses to categorize her character as anything so simple as a martyr or a monster.

Wednesday fans will undoubtedly love how unabashedly weird the show is, which not only deftly recreates a Victorian era teeming with malaise and uncertainty, but features everything from grotesque gore and twisted romance to full-throated misandry and uncomfortable themes surrounding race and empire. But unlike the cheaply bound supernatural tales that give the series its name, Penny Dreadful is, at its heart, a character study. Elegiac, well-written, and willing to hue remarkably close to the various pieces of source material its various characters originally hail from, it’s a genuinely haunting experience from start to finish, and one that will stay with you long after its final credits roll.