The “Addams Family Values” Cast Reveals Behind-The-Scenes Secrets 20 Years Later

Nearly 60 years after Charles Addams’ first Addams Family comics appeared in The New Yorker and a quarter century after the hit TV sitcom had been laid to rest, Paramount Pictures revived Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Fester, and Co. for the big screen. Producer Scott Rudin managed to sign Anjelica Huston, Raúl Juliá, and Christopher Lloyd on for the main three roles respectively and The Addams Family was a hit. The film was released on Nov. 22, 1991 and grossed nearly $113.5 million domestically. So, of course, the studio wanted a sequel.

Almost exactly two years later, on Nov. 19, 1993, Addams Family Values hit theaters, reuniting the original cast (except for Carol Kane as Grandmama, who replaced Judith Malina) and earning coveted praise for any follow-up installment in a film franchise. “It’s the rare sequel that is better than its original, and yet Addams Family Values qualifies,” Roger Ebert wrote in his review at the time. Though the sequel failed to bring in the box office numbers of its predecessor (in total nearly $49 million), it’s become a modern classic, a film that airs on television every Halloween (thanks to the natural ghoulishness that the family casts off) and Thanksgiving (due to a particularly hilarious pilgrims-meet-Pocahontas play at Wednesday and Pugsley’s camp, one of the movie’s highlights).

“Is there not another movie they can play during this time?” lamented Mercedes McNab, who played Wednesday’s sleepaway camp nemesis Amanda Buckman. “That was probably my awkward stage so every year, around Halloween and Thanksgiving, I have to relive my awkward stage … It’s been like 20 years. I was actually dwelling on that. I was thinking, Wow, it’s been 20 years. Oh my god, that’s terrifying. I can’t believe I’m that old.”

Two decades later though, those involved with Addams Family Values still have incredibly fond memories.

“I think the way that particular cast just embodied those characters was just perfection,” screenwriter Paul Rudnick told BuzzFeed. “We were all such odd characters, even though we were a really functional family, in a way, as eccentric and crazy as we were,” Christopher Lloyd noted with a laugh. “And it was such a wonderful feeling amongst us of being a family almost. We were The Addams Family!”

Below, the cast and crew of Addams Family Values look back on making macabre movie magic, their auditions, the lines they can’t escape, first kisses, some unexpected Michael Jackson drama, and how they remained close through it all.

1. If it wasn’t for Sister Act, we may not have Addams Family Values.

Rudin and Rudnick had been working together on Sister Act since 1987 (some creative differences led the screenwriter to ask to be credited with the pseudonym Joseph Howard after the script went through excessive changes) and the producer asked Rudnick to be the original Addams Family script doctor. “Scott Rudin brought me on board right before the movie started shooting to do an overhaul and work on throughout the shooting process,” Rudnick recalled.

“The first film had done well so the studio was eager for a sequel and because Scott managed to reunite that amazing cast and Barry Sonnenfeld, who was the terrific director, I was brought on board too,” he said of getting the gig penning Addams Family Values, his first solo screenwriting credit. “I think we were allowed to get away with a lot more because the first movie had been successful. The reins were a little looser.”

2. The boundaries were practically nonexistent.

Despite the extremely morbid jokes (“Everyone knows it. When you have a new baby, one of the other children has to die,” Wednesday explains), alarmingly elaborate pranks involving guillotines and electric chairs, and, of course, some heavy sexual undertones, Rudnick doesn’t recall anything having to be cut from the film to maintain a PG-13 rating. “I remember there was one moment on set when Barry called his wife gleefully and said, ‘Guess what? Today I threw a baby off a roof!’” the screenwriter remembered with a laugh. “So once that proved normal, there were very few boundaries.”

3. Christopher Lloyd was a huge Fester fan before he was offered the role.

“I grew up on Charles Addams’ cartoons, particularly The Addams Family and Uncle Fester was always one of my favorites,” the now-75-year-old actor told BuzzFeed. “Every time the magazine came in with Charles Addams’ cartoons, I’d open it up, hoping there’d be one with Uncle Fester. He just always appealed to me, his whole persona. So, I was astonished when, literally decades later, I get a call to play the part.”

But shock soon turned to fear for Lloyd, who was worried about bringing the character he loved on paper to the big screen. “I was very excited and everything, but I just didn’t see how I was going to do it because just physically what he is, this kind of roly poly with a round head. I didn’t quite see how I would be able to duplicate his appearance,” Lloyd said.

And it wasn’t just Fester’s looks that worried the actor, who had then recently stepped away from Doc Brown with the final installment of the Back to the Future trilogy. “I was concerned about his voice and things like that because you don’t hear that in the comic strip. So I was very concerned about that and trying to capture the attitude of the guy as I had perceived it, looking at the cartoon.”

4. In fact, Lloyd thought he was going to be fired from the movie.

Concerned about how he would manage to embody Fester, Lloyd met with Sonnenfeld to come up with a solution. “The makeup people came up with prosthetics to put on my face to give me that round look and I had no trouble shaving my head to be bald. After I got made up, they wanted to test it to see how it’d look on camera so Raúl Juliá and I did a scene, just so they could see how the makeup worked out,” Lloyd recalled. “I was very insecure because I hadn’t had a chance to really do Uncle Fester yet and I really didn’t feel like I was very convincing. But I swallowed those concerns and just tried to do it for the sake of the screen test.”

A few days later, Lloyd got a call from Sonnenfeld and Rudin, asking him to come to Paramount. “There was a sound of concern in their voices. And, of course, I was panicked,” he said. “I remember arriving at their offices and there was a guy who, without doing anything to himself, looked exactly like Uncle Fester. He was roly poly, he was bald, he just had the look. And I thought, Oh jeez. He’s the guy they’ve decided [to replace me with]. So Barry, Scott, and I went into a screening room and they played the scene. I watched it with some trepidation and then afterwards they said, ‘We just don’t think the prosthetic pieces work. Simply with makeup, we could get the effect we’re all looking for.’ They thought the prosthetics were limiting my facial expressions, so we chucked the prosthetics… and I was very, very relieved.”

As for that Fester lookalike at the Paramount office? “He became my stand-in during the film,” Lloyd said, looking back on his paranoia with laughter.

Though it took “a few days before [he] felt really comfortable” in the role, two decades later, Lloyd is pleased with the end result. “Recently, it was on television and I guess it worked out alright,” he said with a chuckle.

5. Lloyd had a not-so-magical way of appearing shorter.

Though, at 6’1”, the actor was only an inch shorter than Juliá, and had a few inches on Huston and Joan Cusack, who played his love interest Debbie Jellinsky in Addams Family Values, he magically appeared far shorter. “I always had my knees bent to make me look shorter and more squat,” Lloyd said. “It worked out well because it gave me kind of a funny walk.” In a behind-the-scenes vignette at the time, Sonnenfeld admitted that when thinking of Lloyd, he thought of someone “tall and lanky and thin,” as opposed to Fester, “a short, bald, fat man.” “He’ll be standing up tall and thin and you say, ‘Ready. Roll camera,’ and it’s like you press a button and he drops a foot,” Sonnenfeld noted.

6. For many, the makeup and wardrobe was kind of a bitch.

Lloyd said he was in the hair and makeup trailer for two or three hours. “It was a lot of blending and it took some time to get it all worked out, which is fine,” Lloyd said. “I’ve done a lot of roles that’ve required a lot of makeup so I didn’t mind that at all.”

Rudnick recalled Huston having a rough go of it as Morticia. “In both films, she wanted to look like she was always gliding through them, which is so right for Morticia … The hair and makeup on Morticia are very extreme. To capture that sort of Addams essence, they did develop a certain hair and makeup and lighting technique to give her that wonderfully, unearthly glow. She was valiant because the dress was so form-fitting and the wig was very heavy. Because people have such an image of Morticia in their minds from the cartoons and TV series, she was very aware of having to live up to that image and she did just an extraordinary job. She earned her keep because she looks so at ease and elegant, but it’s not an easy day’s work.”

Carol Kane, a friend of Huston’s since they were 19, signed on for the Addams Family sequel as her mother Grandmama, which was a “fun” dynamic for the actresses since Kane is younger than Huston, but “only by a sneeze,” she noted. “The makeup was, for me, definitely the hardest part of doing it. That was very strenuous because it just takes so long to do so you’re basically in the makeup chair at 4 in the morning or so. It took at least three hours and then, once you’re in it, you’re sort of in prison,” Kane explained. “It was very odd for my dogs who I’ve already brought to work with me because they would go to lick my face and it was just rubber. It was difficult having all that rubber on your face for so long. It starts to really feel like you want to rip it off, which you can’t do.” She laughed. “But I think it was to a good end.”

The actress also wore a wig that was floor-length, making it very hot. “That wig was amazing. It weighed I think 5 pounds and it was down to my feet,” Kane said. “In every other way, it was delightful and wonderful to be part of, but physically, it’s very challenging for pretty much all of us, I guess. Anjelica had her eyes pulled up and all that and I had the rubber, and Chris had the rubber … Barry is such a genius with special effects stuff and so one had to be quite precise. It was an exercise, but it was also a joy.”

7. Carol Kane had not been considered for the role of Grandmama until the second movie.

In a bit of a dramatic turn, 66-year-old actress Judith Malina, who’d played Grandmama in the original film, wasn’t asked back for Addams Family Values. Kane was instead called in to meet with Sonnenfeld and Rudin, though she hadn’t been contacted about the role previously. “I definitely wanted to be a part of it,” the actress said. “I saw the first movie and loved it … I went in to see Barry Sonnenfeld and Scott Rudin at Paramount and I had a fun meeting. Not an audition, but a meeting. And they just asked me to do it, which was very exciting, especially because Anjelica, my daughter, is one of my oldest friends. And I already had a relationship with Christopher from Taxi and I knew Raúl forever so it was just nice to be a part of that group that I already loved.”

8. Addams Family Values was one of the last films Juliá released before he died.

Juliá was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1991, the year Addams Family came out and everyone who worked with him on the film spoke very highly of his strength, particularly during a scene where Gomez is singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as his character lays on his deathbed, brought on by Wednesday smiling. “I thought Raul was very beautiful when he sang his song when his character was dying and everything,” Kane said. “I think he may have already been sick at that time, so looking back at that, I think about how brave he was. He was quite a genius. I feel lucky to have been with that group of actors and that director and to bring of fantasy of life is always an honor.”

9. Mercedes McNab has a small role in the 1991 Addams Family, but she still had to audition for Addams Family Values.

One of the most memorable moments from the first Addams Family has long been the Girl Scout scene in which a young girl shilling cookies happens upon Wednesday and Pugsley’s lemonade stand. “It was my first job ever,” McNab said of the 1991 film. “I specifically remember the audition. I borrowed my friend’s little Girl Scout uniform and … I remember them really laughing a lot in the room. But, at that time, I’d probably gone on 100 auditions and had never gotten a job yet.” Then, Addams Family changed that. “I got the job and I had to wear green head-to-toe,” she said. “I remember green stockings and I don’t think you even see them in the movie, but they were these bright green opaque stockings. They were the most hideous thing you could find.”

With the scene clocking in at about 30 seconds long, McNab’s parents tried to brace her for potential disappointment. “My parents kept warning me, ‘You know, it’s such a small scene. Don’t even be surprised if it’s not in the movie. It could easily be cut out.’ And then, we found out later that when they were doing screenings with test audiences, it was voted everyone’s favorite scene,” the actress recalled. “It started being used in all the commercials and you couldn’t actually get away from it. That was really awesome.”

10. Yes, David Krumholtz is really that unathletically inclined.

As the Addams’ new nanny and the black widow after Fester’s heart (and bank accounts), Debbie (Cusack) convinces Morticia and Gomez to send Wednesday and Pugsley to Camp Chippewa, where they meet Amanda and Joel.

For then-15-year-old Krumholtz, who grew up in Queens, N.Y., and saw two or three movies every weekend with his father, it was a dream come true. “It was just this mind-blowing thing. It was the first time that I came out to L.A. … I was just a big filmophile so to be on a set like Addams Family Values with the makeup and the production design and the wardrobe, I remember, very distinctly — and I never forgot this feeling because it’s very important, I think, to remember these kind of things — the first day on that set, I was just feeling so lucky and just blown away. It was like I was taken to some magical land. It wasn’t lost on me. I just couldn’t believe it and it was really something. That’s a feeling I’ve taken with me … I had never been on a soundstage before or any of that so it was all a dream come true when I got to Addams Family Values.”

Krumholtz also enjoyed being “out in the wildness,” though the now-35-year-old actor, who’s married and about to become a first-time dad, admitted he didn’t always take to it so well. “One time, they took us into the camp and they gave us fishing lines and I’d never fished before,” he recalled. Not knowing exactly what he was doing, Krumholtz wound up with the line wrapped around his head and the hook into his neck, “about an inch away from my jugular,” he noted. “The production assistants who were supervising us were like, ‘OK! You’re done for the day.’ (laughs) But it was a blast. It was like going to camp.”

Krumholtz took part in another outdoor activity, but that time, it was for a scene in Addams Family Values where the campers are doing archery. “I actually was supposed to get the arrow on the bow and then shoot it off camera. I just had such a hard time and they were rolling, so I just kind of threw it,” he said with a laughs. “I guess looking back, that was my first improv. I remember thinking, I’m gonna get in trouble ‘cause I can’t get the arrow on the bow. They’re rolling and they’re probably all waiting. Oh my god. So, in real-life frustration, that’s me throwing it down and walking out. I was super angry at myself. Then, after they cut, they all started laughing and they were like, ‘That was hilarious!’ I was like, ‘Oh! OK!’”

13. Michael Jackson went from Addams Family Values title song performer to the butt of an unexpected joke.

The original plan was for Michael Jackson to record a horror-themed song for Addams Family Values and film a music video to promote it, but when dentist to the stars Evan Chandler accused Jackson of molesting his son the summer before the film was set to be released, plans shifted. “I think he completed the video for it, but it was just a little too risky to include it in the final movie at that point,” Rudnick recalled of the circumstance. “I think it involved him living in the Addams Family mansion and all of his neighbors storming the place with pitchforks and torches. So it was a little too close. (laughs) That’s why it wasn’t included.”