Wednesday's Thing Actor Had A Particularly Hard Time With One Finger

The 1964 sitcom "The Addams Family" was a gloriously ghoulish piece of work that featured an upbeat, happy suburban family whose values and interests ran 100 percent counter to everything a decent person might hold dear. Rather than pursue such boring suburban values as cleanliness and stultifying good manners, the Addamses were keen on death, murder, gore, torture, and sex. Gomez (John Astin) and Morticia (Carolyn Jones) were macabre freaks who loved to bone. Their children regularly tortured and killed each other. They kept family members stuffed up the chimney. 

They also had Thing. Thing was a living severed hand that typically reached out of wooden boxes kept around the Addams' haunted mansion. Thing would often contribute by offering an "A-Okay" sign or lighting one of Gomez's cigarettes. In the show's credits, Thing was credited "as Itself," although Thing was typically played by Ted Cassidy, the same actor who played Lurch the butler. When Lurch was in a scene with Thing, the hand would be played by the show's assistant director Jack Voglin. 

In the 1991 film version of "The Addams Family," Thing became unbound by his boxes, and elaborate special effects allowed the severed hand to gallop around the house freely. Thing was played by magician Christopher Hart, and the actor faced massive challenges in finding ways to express Thing's emotions ... when it was just a hand. It's amazing how expressive Hart was. 

A similar challenge faced actor Victor Dorobantu, who played a similarly unboxed Thing in the new Netflix series "Wednesday." This version of Thing, covered with scars, joins Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) at boarding school. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Dorobantu talked about the ways a severed hand might communicate, and how often he had to flip himself the bird in rehearsal.