Wednesday's The Thing speaks

[TMC]

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...-dorobantu-vfx

There's no other way to put this: Let's talk to the hand. When Victor Dorobantu finished playing the disembodied, five-fingered being Thing from Tim Burton’s new Wednesday series he decided to reach out—so to speak—to another performer who once brought the same character to life.

Dorobantu, a 25-year-old magician from Romania, lived half a world away from Christopher Hart, who played Thing in the 1990s Addams Family movies, but they had a lot in common. Not only are they two of the only people on the planet to play this particularly strange character, but both are magicians. Hart still tours widely and is a fixture at the Magic Castle club in Los Angeles.

Now that Wednesday is a monstrous Netflix hit, Dorobantu has become the subject of countless internet searches. “Everybody wants to know how Thing was done behind the scenes,” Dorobantu says. “Everybody wants to know how the VFX works. A lot of people are asking me, ‘Are you real?’”

When Hart was contacted by Dorobantu, the previous Thing actor had a lot of the same questions, with one exception: He knew how real the man behind the hand could be—and how strange it is to channel an entire performance into one part of your body while erasing the rest.

“It’s gonna sound strange, but part of me feels like my hand is an actor and it’s just a different role,” says Hart. “It’s almost like there’s different Batmans.”

Not only has filmmaking technology evolved exponentially since 1991’s The Addams Family and 1993’s Addams Family Values, but Burton’s take on Thing was, of course…different. “When I talked to Victor and we did our Zoom talk, he was giving me some sneak peeks into some of the makeup,” Hart says. “Thing was a very different type of Thing. It was scarred with stitches. It’s a whole different kind of interpretation.”

Now there is a brotherhood of Things, with one missing. On the 1960s TV series, Thing was usually played by Lurch actor Ted Cassidy, who passed away in 1979. Most people don’t know he played both roles. “When you see the credits, it would just say ‘Thing…Itself,’” Hart notes.

Here’s Dorobantu’s take on playing the character Hart described as “a puppet without a cover.”