How Do You Prepare To Fight Wednesday’s Thing? Owen Painter Told Me How They Planned The Battle Against His Own Hand

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Spoilers for Wednesday’s Season 2 finale are ahead! Read with caution, and stream the show with a Netflix subscription.

I promptly binged Part 2 of Wednesday Season 2 right when it dropped on Netflix’s 2025 schedule. Once it was all over, the scene I kept thinking about was the fight between Isaac Night and Thing. So, when I got the chance to interview the actor behind this season’s big bad, I had to ask him what it was like to fight his own hand.

The ending of Wednesday Season 2 was certainly action-packed with cliffhangers – like Enid’s fate – and twists – like the Ophelia reveal. However, the biggest shock to me was the fact that we got Thing’s origin story. The hand was originally connected to Isaac Night, this season’s villain, and when I asked Owen Painter about learning this information, he said he was made aware of it early on and that it was “top secret.”

He also said he was covertly studying Victor Dorobantu’s performance as Thing, and trying to pick up on his mannerisms to prepare for the fight, explaining:

I felt certainly like a level of pressure, I guess. And it was a really exciting challenge to try not to work out that amazing physicality that Victor [Dorobantu] brings to it, you know? And I remember watching him on set, but not knowing he knew. And so I was trying to look like I wasn’t researching him, you know? Like, kind of taking down notes of what it looked like.

Along with studying how Dorobantu played the iconic Addams Family hand, Painter said he was also thinking a lot about physical jokes he could do while they filmed the fight between Thing and Isaac. That’s because, while the fight was all about Thing claiming his autonomy over Isaac and defeating him, Painter still had to play both parties involved in the battle while the hand was connected to his character.

So, he tried to prep by writing down all the ideas he could think of to make the fight entertaining:

I kind of came up with a list of jokes that I had, like on the back end of my script of all the things I could think of that would be funny for a hand to do to someone, like get wet Willy and all that stuff.

After Painter wrote down the ideas he had, he told me he worked with the stunt team to plan out how the fight would go. While many sequences involve a person fighting another person, this was obviously unique because he had to fight his own hand, so they had fun playing into the comedy of that, as the actor said:

I kind of did a day with the stunt team where we tracked out some of them, put them into a piece of choreography they were teaching me how to do like Buster Keaton falls and things like that. It was really fun.

Once he worked with the stunt team, it was time to take their plan to Tim Burton and film the fight.

The Isaac actor told me that while some of their plans made it into the cut, the director also wanted to work with him on it, and the fight evolved as they shot it. They also kept coming back around to it, making it so it took about a week to film the whole sequence, as Painter explained:

And then we pitched it to Tim [Burton], and we did some of it, but then a lot of it, after beginning shooting, was just kind of messing around, figuring stuff out. I think we shot it for like a week. You know, Tim just would come up with new ideas, new camera angles, new things to try every single day. [He] kept coming back to it.

He went on to say it was so “fun” and “great,” and I could feel that on screen, too.

Isaac and Thing’s quarrel is quite dramatic; it literally ends with Thing ripping Isaac’s heart out. However, it’s also really funny (I’m thinking about the moment where Thing flips him off and pokes him in the eye), and I love how the show leaned into the absurdity.

Painter’s commitment to playing both the evil Isaac and Thing as the hand worked to regain its own control was quite brilliant, and it made for a final battle that’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

Overall, Wednesday Season 2 is full of memorable and incredible unique set pieces and scenes, including the dance between Enid and Agnes and the body swap episode. And this final battle is certainly part of that list. Owen Painter was brilliant in it, and he absolutely killed what was ultimately a fight with his own hand.