14 Quotes From Christina Ricci That Make Us Love Her Even More

With a self-described “difficult” childhood, Ricci found comfort in playing Wednesday Addams. To take the part of a girl whom she described as having no emotion, Ricci could escape the “charming and happy” persona she put on at home. She explained to The New Yorker that she felt like she was a performer all her life, especially as the youngest child in the family:

When fights broke out in the house, I would do something crazy and make everyone laugh. I knew when I had to be charming and happy, and when other people needed to be cheered up. With Wednesday, there was no emotion, no nothing, and for me that was great, because it felt like I could just relax and not do any work at all.

Ultimately, Wednesday felt to Ricci “like who I could be when I didn't have to put it on for other people.”

Ricci likes being connected to Wednesday in the minds of her fans and feels “inextricably bound to her.” She also admitted in 2019 that she wasn't sure where she and the character diverged:

It’s like a chicken-or-egg debate… Did I influence her as a character, or did she as a character influence my personality?

In the end, Ricci doesn't know. 

When talking about her role as Wednesday Addams in 1991's The Addams Family, Ricci offered a story about how much she enjoyed taking on the role. She spoke about filming the first movie (the sequel Addams Family Values came out in 1993) and described what happened when Wednesday and Pugsley (played by Jimmy Workman) filmed the scene where they auditioned for the school play:

That’s one of my favorite things I ever shot in my entire 30-plus-year career… That was my audition scene. I loved it. Nobody ever asks children to do this… I thought that in itself was super fun. And then when we got to the day, we were doing the scene… we did fencing training leading up to it. That was so fun. 

We had tubes running up our legs, and I had that prosthetic… and the tube of blood would come and shoot out of it. So he had a tube and arm that would just… thud, to the ground. And then the blood spurted, and the whole thing.

Ricci also admitted, "I got in trouble, actually, because at the end… we would fight like brother and sister. They called cut on the last take, and I drenched him in the blood that was coming from my neck. And he was very upset about it. He felt that I had embarrassed him in front of an entire audience of people. Yeah, I got in trouble for that.”

After Ricci and Johnny Depp made Sleepy Hollow together in 1999, rumors swirled that they were a couple. In reality, they had known each other since Ricci was quite young, and anything romantic between the two of them was pretty awkward. Depp explained:

I met Christina when she was nine years old and when you have to regard that person you met at the age of nine as a love interest it's a little [uncomfortable]. Working on Sleepy Hollow we gradually allowed ourselves to get to the stage where it wasn't so... twisted.

For Ricci:

It was a little weird… Anytime you’re rooting around like two pigs in front of 20 men or women on a set, it’s kind of bizarre, especially with someone you met when you were 9 and he was 27. But we get along so well that we could both laugh it off and say, “This is really irritating.”

Even with that, Ricci didn't hate it when people linked her to Depp romantically:

It was awesome - my first tabloid story. If you're going to have a tabloid story written about you, it might as well be with Johnny Depp.

In Black Snake Moan (2006), Ricci played Rae Doole, a misguided young woman kidnapped and chained by Lazarus Redd (Samuel L. Jackson). The role required Ricci to wear very little clothing for most of the movie. Instead of covering up when she wasn't filming, she intentionally walked around half-naked:

I was playing someone who has no sense of her body and places no value on her body. Her body has never done anything but cause harm and she has no regard for herself so she wouldn’t care if she were clothed or not. And as an actress, when you’re playing someone like that, I think it’s inappropriate for you to have any kind of vanity. 

Ricci wanted to make herself more comfortable, but also sought to put her fellow cast and crew at ease:

I needed to lose any sort of self-consciousness because I feel sometimes you can see self-consciousness in a performance when somebody is naked or in a nude scene and I really needed for that not to be there so to help me, I stayed the way I would be for the scene all the time in order to get the crew really used to seeing me that way so that I was comfortable - not only was I comfortable but I would look at anybody’s face and not see them uncomfortable - because if someone else is uncomfortable, it makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong.

It worked. According to Jackson:

Well, you know after about I guess an hour of looking at Christina in those little panties and that shirt, you kind of get over it. That's what she had on every day and she didn't put on a robe between shots and hide… She just kind of hung out, so you get over it pretty quickly.

The experience was one that changed Ricci, however. At least in the immediate aftermath of the shoot:

Once you’re coming out of the character, I think that’s something that just slowly happens the more you start to look like yourself again, the more you’re in your own home again. And it was kind of funny because, you know, I’m a prude and I do not like walking around naked and I was in my bathroom about two months after the movie finished and I was brushing my teeth and I was in my underwear and I looked down and it was like, “oh, god, put something on.” And then I just stopped and thought, “oh my god, I was half naked for two months and my ass was on camera.’”

After her parents divorced when she was 13, Ricci slowly lost touch with her father. In 2000, she told The Guardian why she didn't expect to have any contact with her father ever again:

I know it sounds cold, but it was one of the first things I ever did in my life - to take care of myself. Decide that only people who deserve it can be in my life.

In that same interview, Ricci stated, "On the whole, I don't give people a second chance. They don't get to hurt me again." 

She may not be prone to giving second chances, but she understood that sometimes they're necessary. When talking about her own regrets in 2022, Ricci revealed a specific time in her life she wished she could do over - the 1990s:

This is very dark, but I would just like to go back to that age and do it over again and not make so many f*cking mistakes… Honestly, I regret so much. I'd like to go back to 1996 and be like, "All right… we had a practice run. It went OK, but it wasn't really as great as we wanted it to be. We're going to do this again." People who are like, "I have no regrets." What f*cing magic life did you live?

Ricci met Johnny Depp on the set of Mermaids when he was dating her co-star, Winona Ryder. Only 9 years old at the time, Ricci was struggling to understand a difficult situation on the set of the movie. She told Andy Cohen:

There was something going on on set and someone was not being nice to someone else. And they were like, "Oh, well, he might be homophobic." 

Ricci was in Ryder's trailer but didn't know what “homophobic” meant. Ryder had a hard time coming up with the words to explain it so she had Ricci talk to Depp on the phone. Depp told her, “It's when a man wants to have sex with a man and when a woman wants to have sex with a woman.”

Her reply was, “Ah, OK,” and that was the end of it.