Elsie Fisher, star of the indie hit Eighth Grade, was bound to score some plumb big movie role. And so she has, even if she’ll be heard but not seen. Fisher, 15, will voice a key role in MGM’s animated Addams Family movie, reports Variety. Specifically she’ll play Parker Needler, the daughter of the film’s villain, voiced by recent Oscar-winner Allison Janney. Fisher will be joining Oscar Isaac and Charlize Theron, as parents Gomez and Morticia, as well as Nick Kroll as Uncle Fester, Bette Midler as Grandmama and Chloë Grace Moretz as Wednesday, the most macabre of the ghoulish unit.
Created by cartoonist Charles Addams, the fictional family bowed in 1938 in the form of one-panel cartoons, many of which appeared in The New Yorker. Addams later let it be adapted for the classic TV show, which only ran for two seasons between 1964 and 1966. That was enough to secure its legacy, particularly John Astin’s turn as the bubbly Gomez and Carolyn Jones as the dead-dry Morticia.
The new animated version, which will bring the Addams fam into our reality TV-heavy modern world, will be the first major film take on the Addamses since the beloved two from the early ’90s, namely The Addams Family and Addams Family Values. Both were directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black) and starred the late Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston as Gomez and Morticia. They were joined by Christina Ricci as Wednesday, Christopher Lloyd as Fester and Twin Peaks’ towering Carel Struycken as the family butler-of-sorts Lurch.
On top of her break-out role in Eighth Grade, in which she plays a high school-bound tween struggling with “aging,” Fisher voiced the character of Agnes in the first two (though not the third) Despicable Me films.
