Hunter Doohan’s face lights up. He is, like many Wednesday fans, thinking about Thing, the sewn-up “naive appendage,” as Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) calls him, scampering about the teen supernatural mystery. But unlike many of us, Doohan has actually worked with Thing — and the close-up magician who brought him to life, Victor Dorobantu.
“I was like, ‘We’re not the coolest part of the show,’ ” says Doohan, who portrays multifaceted barista Tyler, gesturing to co-stars Emma Myers, Joy Sunday and Percy Hynes White. Nope — that honor goes to Thing. Myers thinks the disembodied hand is so cool; she gleefully boasts about getting to hold him multiple times.
“It was always fun to work with him because you’d have to do a shot without him in, then with the prop and then with Victor actually there,” Myers, who plays cheery werewolf Enid, adds. “It was fun to be able to play around with it a little bit.”
Victor Dorobantu and his blue morph suit behind the scenes as Thing.
Dorobantu is proud of his work as Thing, despite all the hours he spent in the “uncomfortable” blue morph suit that made Wednesday’s TV magic possible. While the finished product includes all of Dorobantu’s hand acting — as directed by genre master Tim Burton — the rest of him was seamlessly painted out of the series.
“Nobody knew how to do it. We came up with ideas together,” Dorobantu tells Tudum of the process, which included tricks like having a dolly carry him around for speedy movement. “We started from zero. Literally zero.”
By the end of filming, Dorobantu was so in tune with his hand that it practically had a mind of its own. Watch the video above to see the entire painstaking process it took to make Thing a thing — including the very handy decision to have a suitcase full of Things on set.
