Gomez Addams

 ( Comics Characters Introduced In 1942 ) 

John Astin had long sessions with Addams and series producer David Levy, who gave him free rein in developing the character. Enlarging on Addams's description of Gomez as a Latin lover type, Astin suggested the eye-rolling, pencil moustache, and ardent devotion to Morticia.

In the Addams cartoons and the television shows, Gomez wore a necktie to his chalk-stripe suit, though in the films, Gomez wears a bow tie and a wide variety of extravagant clothing. He spends $1000 per month on cigars, and he is an accomplished juggler and Knife throwing. He loves crashing and diving for crabs on Halloween. When he wishes to know the time, he will pull a pocket watch from the breast pocket of his jacket (the chain is attached to the lapel) while simultaneously checking a wristwatch.

Gomez is an Athlete, acrobatic, and eccentric Billionaire. Though an extremely successful businessman, having acquired much of his wealth through inheritance and investments, he has little regard for money and will casually spend thousands of dollars on any whimsical endeavor. Gomez's investments are guided more by whimsy than strategy, yet rarely fail him. Gomez owns businesses around the world, including a swamp, bought for "scenic value", a crocodile farm, a buzzard farm, a salt mine, a tombstone factory, a uranium mine, and many others. In Forbes 2007 "Fictional 15" list of the richest fictional characters, he was ranked number 12 with a net worth of $2.5 billion.

As a young man, Gomez was, per flashback in "Morticia's Romance", a perennially sickly youth, gaining perfect health only after meeting Morticia. He nevertheless studied law (voted "Most Likely Never to Pass the Bar") and is quite proud his law class voted him "Least Likely to Succeed"; and although he rarely practices, he takes an absurd delight in losing cases, boasting of having put many criminals behind bars while acting as their defense attorney, claiming that he "never sent an innocent man to jail"; this is somewhat contradicted in the episode "The Addams Family Goes to Court," which noted that while Gomez has never won a case, he has never lost one either. This backstory, while not mentioned directly, is recalled in The Addams Family (1991), when Gomez announces he will serve as his own attorney, only to lose the case. In The New Addams Family, Gomez had also studied medicine.

Gomez has offered contradictory views on work; in one episode, he claims that although his family was wealthy even in his childhood, he nonetheless performed odd jobs and "scrimped and saved his kopeks," which he considered character building. When his son Pugsley decided to find a job, however, Gomez was horrified, claiming, "No Addams has worked in 300 years!" In the 1991 animated series, Gomez deliberately tried to fail at something, anything, only to realize in the end of the episode that he is only a failure in failure. This is additionally contradicted in "New Neighbors Meet the Addams Family" (season one, episode 9, 1964). He specifically states that Thing always beats him at bridge.

Gomez was played by Raul Julia in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993). After Julia died in 1994, Tim Curry took up the role in the television film Addams Family Reunion in 1998, and in 1999, Gomez was played by Glenn Taranto in the TV series The New Addams Family, where he returned to the madcap attitude of his original 1960s incarnation with Astin guest-starring as Gomez's grandfather. In the Broadway musical, Gomez was initially played by Nathan Lane and later by Roger Rees. In the UK tour of The Addams Family musical in 2017, Gomez was portrayed by Cameron Blakely, who was set to reprise his role in 2021. The films differ from the television series in several ways, most significantly that Uncle Fester is Gomez's brother (in the television show, he was Morticia's uncle). The Addams Family notes that Gomez's parents were murdered by an angry mob, though in one scene in the sequel, when Gomez catches Fester with a pornographic magazine, they both look at the centerfold (unseen by the viewer) and fondly say "Mom". In Addams Family Values, Gomez and Morticia have a third child named Pubert, a seemingly indestructible baby with a thin, black moustache like his father.

Oscar Isaac voiced Gomez in the 2019 animated adaptation of The Addams Family and its 2021 sequel. In the latter film, it is revealed that Gomez wears a wig made of Bigfoot fur due to losing his original hair in a napalm accident.

Luis Guzmán portrays Gomez in Netflix series Wednesday. Both he and Morticia first met at Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for supernatural people (also known as "Outcasts"). It is revealed in flashbacks that he and Morticia were involved in the death of a local teenage boy named Garrett Gates, who tried to kill Gomez in a blind rage, due to Gates' own infatuation with Morticia. Sheriff Galpin still believes that Gomez committed the murder and holds a grudge against the Addams' bloodline. After Gomez is re-arrested for Gates' murder, Morticia and Wednesday Addams exhume Gates' body and find evidence that Gates died of accidental nightshade poisoning, clearing Gomez. In season 2, it's revealed that Gomez had the power to produce strong electrical charges, similar to his brother Fester and son Pugsley, but his powers were taken from him by his classmate Issac Night in an experiment in which Gomez was tricked into participating; it nearly killed him.