Netflix’s Wednesday has made quite the splash, thanks to Jenna Ortega’s now-viral dance to the Cramp’s 1981 hit “Goo Goo Muck.” The star explained how the viral dance came into being, and how she was the one to choreograph the Wednesday dance.
“Initially, they wanted a flash mob, but I thought, no, there’s no way Wednesday would be cool with dancing and encouraging a bunch of people,” she explained on her latest appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Director Tim Burton agreed, saying “Yeah, let’s not do a circle. Let’s have her do her own thing,” Ortega explained.
Once Burton decided on the Cramps song, Ortega was all in. “The Cramps is one of my favorite bands ever, so I was super excited, super pumped,” she said. On TikTok, the dance has been popularly paired with Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary.”
Burton even expressed his trust in Ortega’s ability to come up with a killer dance: “He was like, ‘I know you’ve got it. You’ve been working on it. I’m not even worried about it. I trust you.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah, you know, it’s all so good, and I had not gone over it at all.'”
All the while, Ortega was in a bit of a panic. “Oh, my God. I was kicking myself. I felt like such a fool. I’m not a dancer. I don’t do any of that. I have no experience in that field. I didn’t sleep for two days.” To prepare, Ortega watched footage of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Denis Lavant in Beau Travail, and “archival footage of goth kids dancing in the clubs in the ‘80s” to make it all come together — which it very obviously did.
“I knew there were certain things I wanted to do,” she said of the dance, which didn’t have a strict choreography so much as a vibe to go off of. “I paid homage to Lisa Loring, the first Wendesday Addams, I did a little bit of her shuffle that she does,” she explained, noting that Loring’s shuffle didn’t make the cut but it definitely happened.
And it turns out that the higher ups at Netflix had a feeling that this would become a TikTok trend. “Netflix, they were telling me, ‘Oh, you know Jenna, this is gonna be a thing on TikTok,’ and I thought, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay whatever’… and then they were right.”
“I think we all agree that it’s well done. You just crushed it,” gushed Fallon. Watch the entire interview (along with a clip from Wednesday that isn’t the viral dance) below.
