Jenna Ortega has captured our hearts as the dead-inside Addams teen, but fans are head-over-palms for Thing, her trusty sidekick and breakout star of Wednesday on Netflix. “Is Thing real in Wednesday?” “Who Plays Thing in Wednesday?” and “How Did They Film Thing?” have all become top Google searches since the show aired. The character has single-handedly gotten people emotional over an appendage.
Similar to how the ’60s series and The Addams Family movies were shot, Thing is portrayed by an actor — not an animatronic, and not CGI, which many assumed was used for the show. Victor Dorabantu, a Romanian magician, secured the role of Thing for the Netflix series and has shared a variety of behind-the-scenes videos of photos of how he brought the character to life. Although the hand itself is the real deal, some visual effects were incorporated to achieve its severed appearance: Dorabantu wore a blue chroma-key suit and headpiece while filming, then his face and body were edited out in post-production.
Wednesday. Victor Dorobantu as Thing on the set of Wednesday. Cr. Tomasz Lazar/Netflix © 2022Tomasz Lazar/Netflix
“One of the first conversations I had with Tim [Burton, the show’s executive producer] was about Thing,” Emmy Award-winning prosthetic designer Tristan Versluis shares with Allure. “The design started from that point. Thing was in every episode; it was a key character that was with Wednesday a lot. And we needed to figure out how to bring it back to life.”
While the 2022 series doesn’t explicitly answer any questions about Thing’s backstory (Who was it, if anyone at all?) the design arguably gives the character more, well, character than the versions from the original films and series, which present it as a pristine, pale appendage. Versluis started with concept art to get an idea of the direction Burton wanted to go with the moving mitt.
