At New York Comic Con 2026, I was able to participate in a press conference with Catherine Zeta-Jones as she discussed her new TV show on AMC, Kill Jackie!
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Check out the spirited and engaging interview below!
Q: How was it to move from playing Morticia Addams to Jackie?
Catherine Zeta-Jones:
That was amazing, to come off working with Tim Burton on Wednesday, to play such an iconic characters, Morticia Addams, and put my little stamp on it, and this connotation of Wednesday and the Addams family at large. That was amazing, but you’re right, Morticia Addams is a little bit more held together and a little bit more clipped. And so that was one of the reasons, as much as I love playing and doing Wednesday, as you can imagine. One of the reasons when Kill Jackie came around for me, and when Peter gave me the book, The Price You Pay, which was written for a man protagonist, Jack, and thinking about the gender switch to Jackie, it’s the polar opposite of what I’ve been doing for the last 2 years. So I just relished it. And there’s a part of me that’s been yearning to find a character like Jackie in that she’s a woman in a very dangerous world.
Q: What attracted you to the role of Jackie?
Catherine Zeta-Jones:
She is multifaceted, like we are as women. We’re not a cookie cutter version of what people perceive us to be. But it was living in that dangerous, high octane action roller coaster of a ride that a guy got to do so well in the book.
Q: How did it feel to return to a more action-oriented role?
Catherine Zeta-Jones:
In Red 2, I had some action. I was pregnant in Traffic, which is a stunt in itself. I equated to all my years of dancing training. It’s choreography. It’s like doing love scenes. It’s choreography. You plant this there, you put your hand there, or in fight scenes, it’s like, I do this, you do that. So it’s literally choreography. So when it looks like the guy, before I spit his ear out, is throwing me around like a rag doll, if it wasn’t for my dance training, I probably wouldn’t know how to go about that. I would be terrified I would be hurt.
Q: So Jackie is not a villain, a bad guy, but she’s certainly not a good guy either. How did you balance the moral questionability of the character?
Catherine Zeta-Jones:
That’s a really good question, because that was the essence of what I wanted to do. You can’t follow anybody, a man, woman, or an orangutan for 7 or 8 hours of television if you don’t have a connection, or in this particular case, you don’t root for her.She had a seriously bad past. And her moral compass went one degree when she started doing dodgy art deals to avoid tax and money laundering for people who were probably not very good guys either. So her step back from the dangerous, dubious world was not a huge leap.
And so morally, people can say, hey, she was feeding drugs to people, but she did step back from that. She did want to make amends for that. But I needed people to fall in love with Jackie to follow her on this roller coaster. And Tom did such a great job on the page of finding those nuances. Finding the things for me as an actor to dig deeper into or put more weight into that was Tom’s work on the page.
Q: Who would win in a fight, Jackie or Morticia Addams?
Catherine Zeta-Jones:
I love that. I think Jackie was more complex for me to play because she was new. I was creating a character. As much as I love Morticia, when we all close our eyes, we think of Morticia Addams, we all know what she looks like. We know how she behaves. And that was interesting for me to do, put my take in it. But for me, it was Kill Jackie, that I was literally creating a new persona. But Jackie would kick Morticia’s ass.
Stay tuned for more NYCC 2026 recaps from Cmic Watch