Before Wednesday Season 1, Lady Gaga’s brooding electro-dance track “Bloody Mary” was the kind of fan-favorite deep cut you bragged about knowing — a pulsating gem from her 2011 album Born This Way. “It’s such an interesting, beautiful record,” says Gaga, reflecting on the surprise resurrection of “Bloody Mary.” “But it was considered too weird and too hard for radio — too much of everything.”
When a fan swapped out the original Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck” backing of Jenna Ortega’s Season 1 “Wednesday dance” with “Bloody Mary,” the clip went viral almost instantly. The song trended worldwide, transforming it into a TikTok phenomenon and weaving it into the show’s DNA as tightly as Wednesday’s black braids. Gaga noticed. She re-created the dance on TikTok, cementing a connection between herself and the world of Wednesday that made her appearance in Season 2 feel inevitable. “I still don’t understand why fans took ‘Goo Goo Muck’ off her dance and put it on my song, but thank you,” Gaga says of the remix that brought the track back into the zeitgeist.
Lady Gaga appears in the series’ second season as former Nevermore Professor Rosaline Rotwood in Episode 6, and her monstrous earworm “The Dead Dance” tracks Enid (Emma Myers) and Agnes (Evie Templeton)’s dance in Episode 7. But how exactly did the goth marriage of Lady Gaga and Wednesday come together? That’s a wonderfully woeful tale to tell.
After “Bloody Mary” had a viral moment during the initial airing of Season 1, co-creators and showrunners Miles Millar and Alfred Gough approached Gaga to work on a new song for Season 2. “Lady Gaga emerged as a big fan of Season 1 when ‘Bloody Mary’ became the de facto song on TikTok for Wednesday’s viral dance,” Gough reiterates. “And in the gala [scene] this season, we have another dance sequence, and we wanted to use a Lady Gaga song.”
The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. When Millar and Gough reached out, Gaga already had a new idea for a song haunting the Gothic hallways of her mind. “I got a phone call that the show was looking for music,” Gaga recalls. “I immediately had a song in mind called ‘The Dead Dance.’ Once I knew it would be for Wednesday, I decided to work on it even more and made it extra special for the show.”
Millar and Gough were immediately hooked. “Her team sent us the most incredible song, and we fell in love with it the first time we heard it,” Gough recalls, confident the song would be the perfect spiritual successor to “Bloody Mary.”
But “The Dead Dance” isn’t a gloomy song for the deceased. In fact, Gaga hopes the song is affirming and full of life. “The inspiration for ‘The Dead Dance’ was a breakup, and it’s about how we sometimes feel when it’s over — how a relationship ending can kill our ability to feel hopeful about love,” she says. “In the song, I say, ‘I’ll keep on dancing till I’m dead,’ meaning that I’m acknowledging that, and I’m going to keep going. I’m also saying, ‘I’m taking the power back.’”
And the real power of the song perhaps rests in the moment when, as Gaga says, its meaning is transformed, shifting from heartache to celebration: “In the middle of the song, it says, ‘’Do the Dead Dance, the Dead Dance’ over and over. And that is when the song becomes not just about the relationship. It becomes about having fun with your friends when you’ve been through something tough and amazing.”
Millar and Gough wanted to bring Gaga fully into the Wednesday world, and what better role than the ghost of former Nevermore professor Rosaline Rotwood? “The reason that I am in Wednesday really has to do with music,” Gaga explains. “After [‘The Dead Dance’] happened, they asked me if I wanted to be on the show, and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”
“She plays Rosaline Rotwood, whose grave Wednesday visits to try to restore her psychic powers,” Gough says. “She’s an Oscar-nominated actor. Her scenes are great.”
In Episode 6, it’s revealed that Professor Rotwood taught at Nevermore during the 1960s and once served as Grandmama Frump’s (Joanna Lumley) mentor when Hester was a student. Though Rotwood died under mysterious circumstances and was buried in the school graveyard, Wednesday discovers that if she can recite the inscription on her headstone, she’ll be granted temporary psychic sight. Unfortunately for Wednesday, this summons Rotwood and her dark psychic abilities, and when Enid unexpectedly interrupts the ritual, Enid (Emma Myers) and Wednesday swap bodies.
It’s a deliciously twisted plot, and one that came to life when Gaga stepped into director Tim Burton’s gothic Addams playground. “Being on the set was such a trip — it was just so sick,” Gaga says. “The art direction, the craftsmanship, the attention to detail. I feel like I got to see something coming into Wednesday that I bet everyone would love to see.” That magic didn’t stop at the set design. To achieve Gaga’s floating scene as the ghost of Rotwood, the team implemented a teeter-totter, which is essentially a seesaw that lifted the pop star six feet in the air.
To no one’s surprise, Gaga and Burton hit it off between takes, discovering a similar sense of humor. “One of my favorite things about working with him was that we thought the same things were funny,” Gaga says. “We’re in this dark world, and we’re all kind of laughing about me floating across the room. I don’t know how to explain it, but when you have a kindred, shared interest in this type of artistry, there’s a certain vibe — and it’s nice.”
From the moment Gaga stepped into the Wednesday universe, the series started moving to her beat — literally. Choreographer Corey Baker was tasked with creating the dance for Enid and Agnes’s Venetian Gala sequence set to “The Dead Dance.” No pressure.
Baker — who previously collaborated with Ortega and Burton on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — was given the script and couldn’t contain his excitement. “The whole thing was crazy. I didn’t know that it was going to be a brand-new Lady Gaga track when I first was brought onto this job,” Baker tells Tudum. “I remember reading the script, seeing this dance would be to a Lady Gaga song, and freaking out.”
After finally getting his hands on “The Dead Dance” — a process Baker likened to achieving James Bond–level security clearances — the choreographer had a short timeline. “We had about a week in the studio to come up with some ideas,” Baker recalls. “Four or five dancers and I got into a studio and developed some moves, tried to establish a tone, figure out a structure for the dance, and make something that felt true to the song, the world of Wednesday, and the characters.”
Similar to Ortega’s creative input for the “Wednesday dance” in Season 1, Baker collaborated closely with Myers and Templeton to polish the dance sequence. “I got to choreograph it and come up with the structure, the tone, and the moves,” Baker says. “Then we brought that to Emma and Evie, and in that process, they naturally contributed, saying, ‘This is quite wolf-y. What if I do it like this?’ We collaborated on those little finishing touches, which has been a huge joy.”
The final choreography delighted Gaga too. “I always like working with new people. I love the dance,” she says. “I really love the move when I make the Thing hand, and then crawl up my arm. My favorite part.”
The poetic parallel between the surprise resurrection of Gaga’s “Bloody Mary” and Wednesday Addams herself isn’t lost on the song’s creator. “ ‘Bloody Mary’ was this very off-the-beaten-path, kind of deep cut on my album Born This Way,” Gaga says.
“In the spirit of Wednesday, it’s so cool that an underdog song started racing up the charts when the dance took place. It means a lot to me, because you believe in something that you’ve worked on and you go, ‘This is ahead of its time, so no one might get it now,’ and it actually happens, 10 years later.”
It’s the same against-the-odds magic that fuels her official Wednesday debut. Gaga didn’t just drop in for a cameo in Season 2 — she slipped into the series’ bloodstream, delivering a ghostly performance and an anthem that feels like it was always meant to be there. “To me, when you know that music and pop culture and Tim Burton all come together… that’s a very special recipe,” Gaga says. “That’s why I’m here.” If “Bloody Mary” was the spark, “The Dead Dance” is the fire.
