EXCLUSIVE: 20th has rounded out the cast of its sequel to cult classic comedy Romy and Michele‘s High School Reunion with the addition of St. Denis Medical‘s Wendi McLendon-Covey.

Character details are being kept under wraps, as is the plot of the sequel, which began shooting in Los Angeles in June.

Released in 1997 by Disney’s Buena Vista, the original film follows two inseparable friends (Lisa Kudrow, Mira Sorvino) who attempt to reinvent themselves as successful career women — the inventors of the Post-it note, specifically — to impress former high school classmates at their 10-year reunion in Tucson.

The sequel, starring Kudrow and Sorvino, will stream as a Hulu Original in the U.S.

Cast set to reprise alongside the duo includes Alan Cumming, Janeane Garofalo, Camryn Manheim and Julia Campbell.

Others set for new roles include Keegan-Michael Key, Rob Huebel, Breckin Meyer, Patrick Warburton, Nathan Lee Graham, Anna Baryshnikov and Sofia Wylie.

Tim Federle is directing from a script by Robin Schiff, who penned the original 1997 film. He’s also producing alongside the original film’s Laurence Mark, with Barry Kemp, Sorvino, Kudrow and Schiff exec producing, Kimberly McCullough co-producing, and Sarah Shepard overseeing for 20th.

McLendon-Covey currently stars in NBC’s hit workplace comedy St. Denis Medical, which returns for its third season on November 2. Previously, she starred in and exec produced ABC’s sitcom The Goldbergs, which completed a 10-season run in 2023. The comedic multi-hyphenate got her start in improv and sketch comedy at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. She is repped by UTA, manager Gladys Gonzalez and attorney David Krintzman.

Heading into the second season of Netflix’s “Addams Family” spinoff “Wednesday,” production designer Mark Scruton had a simple question for showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and executive producer/director Tim Burton: We created the world in Season 1. Now what?

“That was the first question I had when we sat down to get going on this season,” Scruton said, laughing. “We had to take a surprisingly successful show that everybody has seen and give them something new that doesn’t betray what you’ve done but keeps the story moving in the right direction.”

He received some unexpected help with the production’s move from Romania in Season 1 to Ireland in Season 2. “We got to revisit things,” he said, “And we weren’t tied to our sets from the first season, some of which we’d already destroyed. We could dig in and explore what worked, what didn’t work, what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to explore in a different way.”

Much of the new work focused on Willow Hill, a foreboding asylum rife with mysterious deaths and disappearances. The season was broken into two four-episode blocks, with the “If These Woes Could Talk” episode serving as a grand finale for the first block, and as a showcase for Willow Hill.

“We’d been dipping our toe into Willow Hill through the other episodes, but it came to a big crescendo in that episode,” said Scruton, who earned his second Emmy nomination (alongside supervising art director Shane McEnroe and set decorator David Morison) for “If These Woes Could Talk.”

The production found an abandoned seminary in Dublin, and Scruton’s team built entrance gates and transformed multiple levels into an ominous house of horrors that stands in contrast to Nevermore, the school that Wednesday Addams attends. “Willow Hill is a scary, terrifying place, in many ways the opposite of Nevermore, because Nevermore was bizarrely meant to be a quite warm, nurturing place,” he said. Parts of the asylum look benign, but it also contains dark hallways, forbidding cells and a laboratory in the basement where Wednesday discovers unspeakable experiments.

“We had to build the lab in the studio, mainly because we blew it up in the end,” Scruton said. “Otherwise, we would have built it at the location.”

He added, “I really like the scariness in the mundane. You could roam around and explore different levels, which was one of the joys of this job. We get to have a secret door behind a secret wall that leads down a spooky staircase into a secret chamber. Designing those sorts of things never gets old.”

He also embraced the idea of “dead tech,” littering the sets with forgotten machinery that hadn’t worked in years. “In a lot of locations, I built in weird conduits or electrical systems that were clearly defunct,” he said. An aviary was made to look like an 18th- or 19th-century Faraday cage used to block electromagnetic fields, while a four-level clock tower with a working lift was likewise jammed with decaying machines.

Of course, Season 2 didn’t skimp on some of the old “Wednesday” standbys. “We do love a gargoyle on the show,” he said with a laugh. “The bar keeps moving up every year when we do another fireplace or another gargoyle.”

Wednesday’s brother, Pugsley, has a fireplace inspired by Caliban’s cave in “The Tempest,” while the variety of creature designs used for gargoyles and grotesque sculptures kept growing. “We end up with a library of them,” he said. “There’s all sorts of different creatures on the walls, so it’s good to have a big catalog of that stuff up your sleeve.”

Additional designs:

The Willow Hill entrance

“We built the entrance gates and the main road in, because it gave us scope and a beautiful symmetry,” Scruton said of the asylum entrance. “You could drive through the gates, drive up to the front door, go inside and explore the different levels.”

The Clock Tower

“I don’t think people realize how much detail there is in the clock tower,” Scruton said of the space, which is one of his favorite creations. “There were four levels you could move through, with ladders and spiral staircases. It wasn’t the easiest set to shoot in, because it was very complicated. But we like environments where the actors can roam around.”

The Nevermore courtyard

The production’s move from Romania to Ireland forced the production design team to create a new Nevermore, the school that Wednesday attends. “The courtyard was a big new set,” Scruton said. “It was one of the first things I did. It had to be covered with gargoyles and rotten with that sort of world.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

Ewan McGregor‘s back in Scotland celebrating Trainspotting‘s 30th birthday.

The Hollywood star, famed for roles in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Moulin Rouge!, Black Hawk Down, Down With Love, and who is currently in theaters with The End of Oak Street, spoke at an Edinburgh International Film Festival session on Friday afternoon, shortly before a party celebrating the anniversary of Danny Boyle’s 1996 film, which launched McGregor to stardom. The live event is set to host McGregor and his Trainspotting castmate Ewan Bremner, as well as producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge and author Irvine Welsh for an in-depth conversation about the cult film, centered on drug addiction and urban poverty.

The conversation was hosted by Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle, who kicked off the proceedings by asking McGregor about his upbringing in Crieff and whether he feels patriotic as a Scotsman in showbiz. Over the course of 90 minutes, McGregor entertained the tightly packed crowd at Edinburgh’s Central Hall with anecdotes about working with Baz Luhrmann, making a film with his 30-year-old daughter and getting naked (which had McGregor re-enacting the moment he slipped over, nude, in front of “300 old ladies” during a stage performance of What the Butler Saw).

McGregor said he “learned a lot about not giving a shit” after his Star Wars prequels were “dragged through the mud.” Deciding whether to take on the role in the first place was “hard” because “the job of an actor is very different in those films.” However, McGregor relished the chance to return in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and admitted being surprised by the warm reaction from fans. “I never went to the conventions [after the prequel films]. Because I think I felt like people didn’t like them, and that’s okay. But when we went to do the premiere [of Obi-Wan], they played the first two episodes. I don’t know how many [but] thousands of people were behind me and I felt this rush. I had never heard that noise.”

McGregor admitted to “trying really hard” to “be a young Alec Guinness” — and found the role much easier in the TV show, when he was closer to the age of Guinness, who played the older version of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy. On whether he will return to the character, McGregor replied: “I hope so! I really would like to do it again because at the end of the series, […] we walked off at the end. There’s got to be a great story or two, or three, or four, or five… Maybe a series or movies.”

It was a jovial session up until McGregor became visibly emotional and had to pause to hold back tears while reflecting on working with his 30-year-old daughter, Clara, in 2023’s Bleeding Love, shortly after he’d divorced her mother (McGregor is now married to U.S. actress Mary Elizabeth Winstead). In the film, based on a story by Clara, he plays her onscreen father while her character struggles through drug addiction. “It was a very painful time, and my children were very hurt, and Clara was very hurt, and very vocal with me. She expressed her… Sorry,” he said, becoming tearful, “[That] took me by surprise! Expressed her anger and when she told me some time later, after a year or two, that she was writing a story about us, I was really scared that it was going to be something like that. When I read it, it was so beautiful and moving, and about the reparation of a relationship between a father and a daughter that hadn’t fully happened yet between us.”

Time dwindled as McGregor told Tuttle about what he looks for in a director and the journey of becoming a director himself with 2016’s American Pastoral. He expressed hope at one day making a movie in his native Scotland. Then came questions from the audience, which allowed the conversation to get even sillier (much to McGregor’s and the audience’s delight).

So, would McGregor consider playing James Bond? “Disappointingly, I never hear my name mentioned in all of the [discourse] at the moment,” he said, prompting laughter. “I might just have missed that boat. Maybe they’ll be looking for somebody a bit younger, as you could imagine. But I would have [liked to play Bond]. That’s a fascinating role. The idea of playing that world is something I haven’t really done.”

McGregor was quizzed on his motorbike documentary series Long Way... (2004-present) with best friend Charley Boorman, and even confirmed the pair will be embarking on a trip across the Atlantic in two weeks on a vintage Oyster yacht.

The 2026 Edinburgh International Film Festival runs Aug. 13-19. Industry events have included talks with Christine Vachon and Ken Burns.