Filmmaker Tim Burton (Dumbo) is the kind of director whose style is made for certain dark albeit mostly harmless cinematic material, so it was really no surprise when he was officially attached a couple of months ago to a reboot of The Addams Family as a TV series for Netflix.
Now, rumors seem to be swirling around that Burton, who is a huge proponent of working with the same actors, wants his go-to star Johnny Depp (Edward Scissorhands) to play Gomez Addams, the patriarch of the “all together ooky” family.
But since Gomez was played in the original 1991 film by late Puerto Rican actor Raul Julia and then given a voice in last year’s animated movie by Guatemalan-Cuban actor Oscar Isaac, some wonder if Burton should cast a Latino in the lead role. Legal problems aside, Depp is such an obvious choice when looking at his history with Burton, so maybe the Sweeney Todd director should look past his usual collaborators and cast someone like Óscar Jaenada or Pedro Pascal. Or just give the role to Isaac since he was already imagined as Gomez back in 2017 when someone uploaded a fake teaser trailer for a new Addams Family Netflix series.
To be fair, nowhere in The Addams Family mythology does it say that Gomez is Latino (his name isn’t Adam Gomez, clearly). Plenty of white actors have portrayed the character before, most notably actor John Astin in the original TV series of the 1960s. In that version, Gomez was of Castilian and Spanish ancestry.
Still, with Julia’s portrayal, the casting of another Latino might be a touching gesture and pay homage to the iconic star. We’re sure Lin-Manuel Miranda’s not busy doing anything anyway, right?