When you play a character as bright (literally) and peppy as Wednesday’s Enid Sinclair, of course people will want to know if you’re anything like her.
“I don’t really think I’m like Enid at all, to be honest,” says Emma Myers. “Goodness, what do I have in common with her?” After listing how she and Enid are different (“I don’t dress like her. I’m not very bubbly. We’re not the same at all”), she inadvertently lands on the one thing she has in common with everyone’s favorite roommate turned Nevermore It girl. “I’ve grown into myself a bit more recently,” says Myers. “I’m a bit more confident, I’ll say that.”
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And while she also says she’s not a “people person,” she is incredibly polite and professional. Upon arriving at her People StyleWatch shoot, in her go-to baggy jeans and an oversize shirt, she says hi and introduces herself to everyone on-set. After a record-fast glam session, she slipped into her first look of the day—a pumpkin-orange sweater and plaid trousers—and walked into the New York City studio that had been transformed into a dreamy Meg Ryan rom-com: park bench, bike, fake autumn leaves and all. As the photographer snapped away, the actress seemed totally in her element while playing the role of herself (albeit a very stylish version).
Authenticity has worked out well for Myers. Since playing Enid—who fiercely stands by roommate Wednesday Addams (played by Jenna Ortega) throughout the first two seasons of the Netflix show streaming now—Myers has garnered more than 10 million Instagram followers. She starred in the blockbuster A Minecraft Movie, just wrapped season 2 of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, and next year she will have a voice role in The Angry Birds Movie 3.
“It’s crazy to be here, because this is what I’ve been wanting to do since I was a kid,” she says. “I’ve just had so many good opportunities, and I’ve been just blessed with this career, so I’m on top of the world—so happy.”
From Homeschool to Netflix Superstardom
Born in Orlando, Myers started her life as a performer in dance, but as her love of the stage grew, she realized she wanted to be an actor.
The first gig that Myers recalls from her acting career was a commercial for the grocery store Publix. “I wonder if it’s on YouTube somewhere,” she muses. “I was a little, little child who steals a strawberry out of the fridge. I had so much fun on that job.” (Editor’s note: This team did a lot of digging and finally found the clip included above with the help of Publix’s company historian!)
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It was only the beginning for Myers, who landed her first small TV-show roles in The Glades and Letters to God and a spot in a short called Crooked, all in 2010 at age 8. It would be a few years, though, before people saw her onscreen again. When Myers was a teenager, her family moved to Atlanta so she could pursue acting more seriously.
She continued to dance competitively while she and her sisters were in a homeschool cooperative. The homeschooling lent itself to her introverted nature, she has said, but dance gave her an outlet and a group of friends. Acting was always her true passion, though, and when the opportunity to join Netflix’s Wednesday came her way in early 2021, Myers was all in.
She originally auditioned for the role of Wednesday but gravitated more toward Enid. On her last callback for Enid, Myers thought she “bombed” it. “It’s insane,” she says, thinking back to the whole process and her final audition, which she says actually made her cry. “It’s always the things that you think you did the worst at that end up working out. Acting is so strange like that.”
Myers landed her breakout role, and the world was better off with Myers’s Enid Sinclair in it. The colorful character, who initially butts heads with roommate Wednesday at Nevermore Academy in season 1, is a werewolf who is stunted in her ability to “wolf out.” (Basically she’s having a hard time transforming into a werewolf for most of the season, but she gets there in due time.)
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Beyond that, she’s your typical teenage girl who loves clothes and is into a cute guy. In the end of season 1, she gets the guy, and she and Wednesday kinda, sorta become friends, even though Wednesday has a hard time letting anyone be her friend. If anyone was going to worm their way into someone’s heart, it was the vibrant Enid Sinclair.
Fast-forward to season 2—which dropped part 1 on Aug. 6 and part 2 on Sept. 3—and there is a lot happening for our main characters. Netflix’s social media accounts threw fans for a loop when they started teasing a new love interest for Enid. As soon as it was revealed that Enid might be stepping away from her season 1 main squeeze, gorgon Ajax Petropolus (Georgie Farmer) for a hot new bombshell werewolf, Bruno (Noah B. Taylor), fans made their upset loudly known—before a single episode even aired. And Myers took note.
“I find it funny because his character wasn’t even out yet,” Myers shares of Bruno. “I was like, ‘Gosh, give him a break, guys. Please give him a break.’ ’’
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New Season, New Look
Myers describes Enid in season 2, which filmed in Ireland, as someone who has “kind of learned who she is, has found a pack that accepts her and meets Bruno.” She says she felt Enid was “juggling” the two boys because she wanted to “still be friends with Ajax.”
“She’s kind of torn between the two,” she adds.
Enid also leveled up her wardrobe for season 2, as a part of finding herself before returning to Nevermore Academy for this year. From head to toe, Enid’s look is new.
“It’s a bit more edgy this time because we wanted to incorporate her strength and her werewolf energy into the look, so a different haircut with new colors. It definitely still looks like she did it herself, which I love. The makeup’s a bit stronger this time, a bit more bold, to kind of reflect her personality and her confidence,” Myers says.
The costume team, composed of Colleen Atwood and Mark Sutherland, looked to places like Japan and New York for Enid’s outfit inspo, they tell People. Atwood says they wanted it to feel like Enid was “reborn” this season.
“She’s come back this season, and she’s the It girl; she’s the social media girl. She’s so different from the character she was in season 1 because she’s wolfed out, so she’s got claws,” Sutherland adds. “We wanted to bring that element into her casual wear, and a lot of that came from the look of Japanese street style. She’s got tears in her tights, which was part of the ‘wolfy’ element that we wanted for her.”
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One of the trickiest parts of playing Enid for Myers is that she has to play the role as it comes, because she doesn’t get her scripts far in advance. She’ll go all-in on a scene or episode, not always knowing what’s coming next.
“We started shooting season 2, and I’d only read the first two [episodes],” she says. “They like to keep us all in the dark. Even if I’m like, ‘Please, I don’t know the storyline,’ they’re like, ‘Too bad.’ ”
One of the show’s hair pros slipped up and was the one to reveal to Myers that her character switches bodies with Wednesday. “I freaked out, because that’s a lot of pressure,” she says. “But nobody told me that, so I fully went into this season not knowing that until a month before we started shooting that sequence . . . insane!”
Myers immediately asked Ortega—who was surprised that Myers didn’t know—about the scene. The Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice actress talked Myers off a ledge and coached her through what is inevitably a flawless performance.
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“Next time, I hope they send me the script a bit earlier so that I can prepare . . . please, Al [Gough] and Miles [Millar], please,” she says of the showrunners.
To promote the new season, Myers has been all over the world on red carpets, where she gets to show off her personal style. She and her stylist Jordan Johnson Chung lean toward designs in either neutrals or dark hues like maroon. She also loves a body-con silhouette, because she says she rarely wears that in everyday life. “I love jorts. I don’t like being uncomfortable. I feel like I wear stuff for work that’s put together, so that when I’m not at work, I just want to be as loose as possible,” she says.
Her favorite part of a red carpet is what happens when it’s over. “[It’s] when the cast sits down and debriefs,” she says with a laugh. After the Wednesday season 1 premiere, “we all went back to our hotel and got changed, and we were awake until like 5 in the morning talking about it,” Myers recalls. “It had been the craziest thing that most of us had done up to that point. I remember we ordered food, and we were like, ‘Oh, and then that famous person was there, and it was crazy.’ ”
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Learning from the Best
Myers shares select moments like this and other snippets of her life publicly but has firm boundaries when it comes to her social media.
“I find it smart not to be on every platform, because people are just so parasocial nowadays that they will either form an idea of you in their head or form a relationship with you, when they actually don’t know anything about you,” she says.
She’s chosen to only be active on Instagram and finds that’s “a lot better than if I was on all the sites, because I find some of them scary,” she adds. “I don’t need to know what everybody says about me all the time.”
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Working with veteran actors—like Jennifer Garner on Family Switch—is helping her navigate her new level of celebrity. Garner gave Myers what she calls “the best piece” of advice: “After you audition for a project, immediately forget about it. Forget about what you do on-set. Don’t linger on any of it; just throw it away,” Myers recalls her saying.
“She’s such a lovely woman, and I used to talk to her about everything,” she adds of Garner. “You learn so much from these people, because they’ve been in this industry for ages. I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to navigate it, so it’s always good to have people that you’ve worked with who’ve been in it for a while.”
Myers’s face noticeably lights up when asked about another superstar she crossed paths with: Lady Gaga, who joined the Wednesday cast for the second half of season 2.
“I had one scene with her, but I actually didn’t shoot my scene with her,” Myers says before offering a spoiler. “They shot it on a green screen for her because she’s a ghost, so she gets kind of phased in. I shot my half of it to a wall.”
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When they did meet to film social media promotion, Myers admits she was totally captivated by the pop icon’s presence and warmth.
“She was amazing. Literally the coolest woman ever. She’s so chill. She was like, ‘If you need anything, just call me.’ I was like, ‘Yes, Ms. Gaga, I will.’ ”
Myers’s aesthetic might clash with her Wednesday character’s look, but if that doesn’t sound like the most Enid Sinclair answer you’ve ever heard, we don’t know what does.
