Waiting for Hunter Doohan

It’s been a long wait for fans of Hunter Doohan’s Tyler on the hit Netflix Addams Family reboot Wednesday. Nearly three years after the show’s premiere to worldwide obsession in 2022, the first half of the second season was finally released this past August, finding Tyler, recently uncovered as the monstrous Hyde responsible for a trail of dead bodies, chained in a cell at the Willow Hill Psychiatric Hospital. As the new episodes expanded and introduced new characters to the world of Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams, including her brother Pugsley (now also her classmate), her new Nevermore Academy principal Barry Dort (played by Steve Buscemi), and Billie Piper’s werewolf music teacher, Tyler remained largely offscreen, talked about more often than seen until the climactic fourth episode, in which he was freed by his master, Christina Ricci’s Laurel Gates, before killing her and escaping into the night. It would be another four weeks until that cliffhanger was resolved when the second half of the season was released earlier this month.

In the weeks between, Doohan, who is currently in New Zealand filming the upcoming horror film Evil Dead Burn, had to opportunity to dip briefly back into the world of Wednesday during a festival in Sydney that brought the show’s creators, including the legendary Tim Burton, and stars together with thousands of passionate fans along with live musical performances and experiences that offered a full immersion into the meticulously crafted universe of the series. The morning of his flight to Australia, Doohan was eager after missing out on much of the press circuit for season two due to his filming schedule. “I’m excited just to hear from fans and get a sense of how everyone’s taking in the season,” he said. “I’ve been in this bubble here in New Zealand. We’re shooting a lot, so I haven’t gotten to really take part in the Wednesday of it all. I just love being a part of the show. I’ve never been a part of something that has such a passionate fan base, so even if it’s people coming up and being mad at me for something that Tyler’s done, I think it’ll be really fun.”

To be fair, there is a lot to be mad at Tyler for. After spending most of the first season as Wednesday’s love interest, a charming and slightly awkward if forthright barista, the revelation of his dual nature as the bloodthirsty Hyde (as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr.) who had been terrorizing the town of Jericho, Vermont, was a shocking twist for many. For Doohan, the unmasking also came as a relief after months of having to hide the truth—both in character and out. “During the audition, I had one scene that felt just a little darker and they said, ‘You know, he’s got a secret,’ and I was like, ‘Is it the secret?’ he recalls. “Then as soon as I was cast, I had a Zoom with the writers and they explained the full arc to me, so I knew everything going in before starting to shoot.” It was not until he got to set, however, that he realized the rest of the cast was in the dark. “The way I found out was there was a conversation where everyone was wondering if they were the Hyde,” he laughs. “It totally colored everything and for me. It made me push all of that as far away as possible, the darker sides of him, because it’s life or death for Tyler, so he’s going be the best liar he can be while he’s under Laurel’s control.”

A longtime fan of Burton’s, Doohan says the reveal has also allowed him to further immerse himself in the unique vision of the director and executive producer, whose darkly humorous influence can be seen throughout the show, which was created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. “For me, the best part of season two was that it felt like I was really stepping into that and having a lot of fun with it,” he says about entering the Burton-verse. “In season one, he directed the first four episodes and Tyler is just hiding so much, I didn’t really get to play in that world with him. This season, all of the locations I was on, all of my scenes, really felt like a Tim Burton movie, which was just a dream come true.”

Working with Ricci, who iconically played Wednesday in two films in the early nineties, was a highlight for Doohan, who calls the character one of his favorites from the Addams family, but his breakthrough role has placed him in the company of a cast filled with many big names. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzmán play Wednesday’s parents while Fred Armisen is her Uncle Fester. Gwendoline Christie starred as Nevermore’s principal in the first season, replaced by Buscemi after her character’s death. “When we did the carnival scene in episode one of season one and I got to meet Gwendoline for the first time, I just had to get fanboying out over Game of Thrones to her out of the way,” he laughs. For Doohan, Ortega, and the other relative newcomers playing the Nevermore students, the stacked cast also pushed them to the next level. “It felt like, ‘Okay, they’re really putting the best possible version of this out there,’” he explains. “I think it made all of us who we were the younger ones in the cast just step our game up and make sure we’re trying to be the best we could knowing we’re going to be in scenes across from these icons.”

The success of Wednesday has quickly turned Doohan into a rising star (Evil Dead Burn will mark his first major feature leading role when it is released next summer), but his current position is the result of years of hard work, focus, patience, and dedication. Growing up in Arkansas, he came to acting in high school by chance but quickly realized he had a passion for the work. “I happened to audition for the school musical in tenth grade and then I just slowly fell in love with it,” he recalls. “I think at first more so it was more about finding a group of people in a place that I felt like I fit in because I didn’t really have that before finding the drama classes. Once I found it, I just spent all my time there. We would eat our lunches there, we had rehearsals till 8 PM every day, came down on weekends and built sets, and it just totally took over my life.”

Before he graduated, he had already decided on acting as a career, even though he admits now that “looking back, that’s so young to focus in on exactly what you want to pursue.” He began auditioning for theater schools and was ready to begin classes when an opportunity in Los Angeles presented itself. “I was supposed to go for two weeks for an internship with a casting director and then I got the chance to stay out there,” he recalls. “I decided to take a gap year and then just never went back. I went to acting school in LA. I never saw film and TV, as much as I loved it, as a real option growing up in Arkansas, so once that door was slightly opened, I ran with it.”

As a young actor throwing himself again and again into the grueling audition process, Doohan soon realized that he needed to make work for himself. “I started writing because I just needed footage for my acting reel,” he says. “I’d written before and something about storytelling has always just drawn me in. I wrote a play in high school my senior year that we got to put on, which was really fun. I’m really fascinated by getting to be a part of every aspect of the filmmaking process. Occasionally as an actor, you can feel like you’re only one little piece of it, so it’s fun to be a part of the whole thing.”

That early experience has proved useful as he recently took on a producer role for the film The Wilderness, which he also starred in and which will be released next month. Written and directed by Spencer King, the movie is a thriller set at a wilderness therapy camp for troubled teenagers based on King’s own experiences at a similar establishment. “The script was just so jarring and honest,” Doohan says. “As much as I love playing this high-fantasy Wednesday world, doing something so grounded was really fun.”

Doohan still has several weeks to go filming Evil Dead Burn, the latest entry in Sam Raimi’s cult series, and while details are scarce, the actor promises the movie will please longtime fans while bringing a new perspective courtesy of its French director and co-writer Sébastien Vaniček, whose independent 2023 debut Infested was a striking and critically acclaimed horror film about an infestation of deadly spiders. “It does a really beautiful job of tying in the lore from the whole franchise and bringing it into this new film,” Doohan offers. “Sebastian is incredible. His first feature is really visceral and brutal, so he’s kind of the perfect next director to play in the Evil Dead world.”

Soon after he wraps in New Zealand, Doohan is headed straight to Ireland to begin filming the third season of Wednesday, hopefully a relief to those eagerly awaiting news of Tyler after the latest cliffhanger. As for what’s next, the 31-year-old actor says he is ready for anything that sparks his interest. “I describe it as being genre-agnostic,” he says about the way he picks his projects. “It’s not like I’m searching for one specific thing. If something strikes me, that that’s what I want to do.”

Wednesday is now streaming on Netflix. The Wilderness will be in theaters on October 17.