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From his early days at Walt Disney Animation to his work producing and directing episodes of Wednesday, Tim Burton has had his own distinctive qualities. He loves jagged checkerboard patterns, straight out of German impressionist films. He sympathizes with monsters and weirdos, especially when contrasting their sincerity to 1950s kitsch. And he loves his leading ladies, frequently collaborating with Lisa Marie, Helena Bonham Carter, and Eva Green.
For Wednesday‘s third season, Burton gets to reunite with the actress with whom he’s done some of his best work. Winona Ryder joins the cast as “Tabitha.” Who is Tabitha? We have no idea, but we can be pretty confident that Ryder and Burton can bring out the best in one another.
Ryder made her film debut in the 1986 football drama Lucas, but it was her first collaboration with Burton that made her a star. Playing the strange and unusual Lydia Deetz in 1988’s Beetlejuice established Ryder as the preeminent goth girl of the era, someone both too sensitive and snarky to fit into polite society. Even in decidedly different types of movies, such as Martin Scorsese‘s The Age of Innocence (1993) or the inexplicable Alien: Resurrection (1997), Ryder retained the same otherworldliness that she developed working on Beetlejuice and especially 1990’s Edward Scissorhands.
After the duo’s second collaboration, Ryder and Burton did not work together again until the 2024 sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, in which Wednesday star Jenna Ortega played Lydia’s daughter Astrid. In the meantime, Burton moved on to collaborate with Carter, Green, and others, often to great effect. But there’s no question that Burton’s latest output fails to match his best work, with 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (starring his more frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp) as the filmmaker’s last well-received movie.
For her part, Ryder could use a creative charge as well. Although she was part of the pop culture phenomenon that was Stranger Things, few would place oft-harried mother Joyce Byers among her best work. Even her previous Burton reunion, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, failed to find enough interesting notes for her to play.
Will Wednesday turn things around for Ryder? It’s hard to say, and not just because we don’t know anything about her character Tabitha. It’s also because Wednesday may be in line with Burton’s aesthetic, which in turn matches the original The Addams Family cartoons by Charles Addams, but it is created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. The duo reimagined Wednesday as a YA protagonist, which has proven to be massively popular with audiences, but may perhaps be out of Ryder’s wheelhouse.
Can Ryder and Burton rediscover their old magic? Or will Wednesday leave us nostalgic for the ’80s? We’ll find out when Tabitha takes the screen, whoever she may be.
Wednesday seasons 1 and 2 are now streaming on Netflix.
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