Jenna Ortega Is Not Asking Permission

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Had it been up to Jenna Ortega, she would have spent the summer after Wednesday's debut season chilling on an Icelandic farm—learning to fish, making dinner, helping care for the spring lambs. She hatched this pastoral escape plan online, on a rural work-exchange site, soon after the show became a global hit in late 2022. 'I was so stunned that I didn't really process it,' Ortega says of her overnight megafame. 'I still haven't.' She'd been acting for a decade, but this was a new level. It was so overwhelming, it felt like it was happening to someone else and so unnatural that it was something human beings weren't designed to go through. 'We used to live in villages and meet maybe 300 people in our lifetimes, and now we can travel all over the world and meet way too many people, and way too many people can be familiar with you.' She tried different things to reduce her exposure. She bought a flip phone. ('I had a really hard time with social media,' she says. 'It was really turning me off.') She booked the farm stay and planned to travel on her own after that. But then Tim Burton asked her to do Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and she spent the summer shooting in London instead.
Ortega is telling me this over iced teas on the patio of a popular cafe in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A., where we're meeting an hour later than planned. Earlier, she'd been trying to humanely evict a wasp's nest from her balcony and locked herself out of her apartment in the process. A friend came over with spare keys, but they were the wrong ones—so she shimmied down a nearby palm tree to freedom. ('Mercury retrograde,' she says. She doesn't believe in it, but she also concedes that it explains a lot.)
Ortega is in town to promote Alex Scharfman's horror comedy Death of a Unicorn, with Paul Rudd, in which she plays the surly teen daughter of the lawyer for an evil pharmaceutical family, and Trey Edward Shults's experimental drama Hurry Up Tomorrow, with Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. the Weeknd, in which she plays 'the feminine part of Abel's brain.' She recently got back from Paris, where she shot Cathy Yan's comedy thriller The Gallerist, about an art dealer, played by Natalie Portman, who tries to sell a corpse at Art Basel. (Ortega plays her high-strung assistant.) Last year, she filmed Taika Waititi's adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun in New Zealand, then headed to Dublin afterward to shoot the long-awaited second season of Wednesday, which premieres in August. Tomorrow, she leaves for London to begin work on J.J. Abrams's new film, a project so deeply under wraps that the script was transmitted to her under fake names via different accounts.
Nonstop work schedule and wasp's nest notwithstanding, Ortega looks calm and unruffled. She's dressed comfortably in a white tank top, plaid jacket, thrifted jeans, and Thom Browne loafers. In person, she's warm, thoughtful, and down-to-earth, almost preternaturally composed for a 22-year-old who has struggled with anxiety, to the point that she once chewed through her Invisalign from grinding her teeth at night. Between her freckles and self-possession, her tiny stature and intelligent eyes, she looks simultaneously very young and wise beyond her years. She radiates the quiet confidence of someone who's no longer asking permission to be herself.
'I was always very existential as a kid,' says Ortega. 'The world was always ending. I was worrying about things way earlier than I needed to.' Disappearing into characters offered an escape from the pressure she put on herself. 'My work felt like the safe place. When I wasn't on set, I had a really, really hard time.' She remembers her teen years being 'full of tension and fear.' She was terrified of messing up. When she sees old videos of the happy, bubbly kid she was on TV, 'I can see clearly that something is wrong, because she doesn't want to say or do the wrong thing.'
For a moment, after Wednesday blew up, a familiar narrative seemed to coalesce around Ortega—the kind reserved for young women who stick up for themselves and don't calibrate their words for public consumption. She felt 'incredibly misunderstood.' She gets that the internet rewards controversy, but she tries not to pay attention. 'I feel like being a bully is very popular right now,' she says. 'Having been on the wrong side of the rumor mill was incredibly eye-opening.'
It's easy to hide on social media, which makes it even easier to say hurtful things. 'We're incredibly desensitized and disconnected from real interaction,' Ortega says. 'I mean, God, if you could speak to everybody like Wednesday—just say what you truly mean—it would be amazing!' In real life, most people try not to upset other people. Nobody wants to let anyone down. But Wednesday isn't burdened by any of that. 'She doesn't care,' Ortega says. 'It's pretty funny, when you think about it. She's an outsider, but now she's on these mugs, cereal boxes, and T-shirts. You're just thinking, Oh, man, she would hate this!'
Ortega—who grew up in the Coachella Valley, the fourth of six siblings—booked her first acting job when she was nine. But it wasn't until recently that she started to feel a sense of control over her life and career. From the beginning, she chafed at being told what she could and couldn't do. She always knew that films were what she wanted, but because she was doing well in commercials and TV, she felt pressured to 'stay in that lane.'
One of the pitfalls of being a child star, especially one shaped by the Disney Channel machine—at 13, Ortega was cast as Harley Diaz, the middle child in Stuck in the Middle—is that professionalism is often mistaken for maturity. Looking back, she can see how much she didn't understand, but thought she did, because of how she was treated. 'There are certain things that you're only going to learn from experience,' she says. 'It's hard for me to accept that people didn't respect that more.'
In recent years, Ortega has befriended other actresses who survived the treacherous transition from child star to A-list actress—people like Natalie Portman, Winona Ryder, and Natasha Lyonne. 'It's been so beneficial and so cozy,' she says. 'They've seen it all, and, honestly, during a much darker time in Hollywood. We've all got this jaded way about us that I don't think we'd have if we hadn't started so young and had so many brutal realizations and experiences.' She pauses, then deadpans, 'But they turned out all right.'
On the phone a few days later, Portman tells me that she and Ortega discovered on the set that they both like to crouch in between scenes. 'We don't sit in a chair; we just kind of squat in the corner,' she tells me. 'Catherine Zeta-Jones, who was also a child actress, said she did it too—that it's a way of grounding yourself. There'd be all these chairs, but we'd just squat and look at each other and be like, 'Wow, this is weird.' '
Portman agrees that child actors are often treated like tiny adults. But with her and Ortega, there is also the matter of their size. 'We're both physically tiny, so people will often treat you like a child forever,' she says. 'I'm 43 now, and people kind of pat me on the head. I don't look like a child, but I often feel like I'm treated like a kid. Child actors often cultivate a serious persona because otherwise they'll get treated like kids forever. When you start working as a kid, you kind of always feel like a kid in the workplace. Having some of that seriousness helps remind people, 'I'm a grown-up.' '
Ortega believes wisdom isn't something that is automatically conferred with age. 'It really irks me when people say, 'Oh, you don't understand. You're so young.' Because if you're not open to the experiences that you're having and you're not willing to learn from your mistakes or reflect on your decisions, you're not going to grow at all. You're choosing to be a bystander.'
When Wednesday first came along, Ortega hesitated. She'd spent five seasons as young Jane on the CW's Jane the Virgin and three on Disney's Stuck in the Middle. Eager for a change, she lobbied for a role in the second season of Netflix's psychological thriller You—and got it. In 2022, Ortega starred as Tara Carpenter in Scream, the first in a string of horror films—Studio 666, X, and American Carnage—that showcased her dry, acerbic exterior over her vulnerable core and earned her a solid reputation as her generation's scream queen.
'I was getting to this point in my career where I was doing movies and getting in the rooms,' she says. She knew that starring in a show would prevent her from taking on more films. 'So I kept telling everyone no. I almost didn't want to hear what Tim [Burton] had to say, and really like it, and feel like I needed to do it—which is kind of what happened.'
Ortega was in New Zealand shooting X when she met with Burton over Zoom. She was wearing a prosthetic—her character's head had just been blown off—but Burton didn't even acknowledge it. One of the scenes she did for him involved catching Thing spying on her and threatening to lock him in a drawer forever. She'd been up for 24 hours and was supposed to go to sleep, but instead she went into her bathroom and filmed a second take. 'I didn't want Tim to have that be his last impression of me,' she says. 'The next day, I was killing time in my hotel room and I found myself thinking about her—like, maybe she moves like this. And then I realized, Oh, man, I think I'm stuck, because I really love this girl.'
Burton would go on to direct half of the first season and half of the second of Wednesday.'When I read this thing, I went, like, Oh my God, this is written for a 16-year-old girl, but I can relate. People have said I act like that sometimes,' Burton tells me over the phone from London. 'But it all hinged upon finding somebody to play Wednesday. It had to be somebody who just had it in her soul, and when we saw Jenna, there was just no question.'
Ortega was 18 when production began on the first season of Wednesday. She was on her own in a foreign country (the first season taped in Romania), feeling lost and confused. 'In TV, everything moves fast. They're writing scripts, and you're shooting episodes; everything's mixed around. It's very easy to feel like a puppet. You just feel very vulnerable,' she says. 'I've been a series regular for multiple shows. I know what it's like to feel in the dark as an actor.' At times, she's felt like she couldn't speak up if she was uncomfortable: 'I didn't really have a place.'
Burton, however, welcomed her input. 'She's playing the character, and I always felt her instincts were right,' he tells me. He went on to cast Ortega as Astrid Deetz, Lydia's (Ryder) teenage daughter in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.'When I first met Winona, I had such a strong feeling about her,' he says. 'I had a similar reaction when I first met Jenna. They both have an internal strength that you can't put into words.'
Ortega wasn't in a great place after the first season of Wednesday. 'To be quite frank, after the show and trying to figure everything out, I was an unhappy person,' she admits. 'After the pressure, the attention—as somebody who's quite introverted, that was so intense and so scary.'
But things are different now. She's a producer on the show, which felt like a natural progression. 'I sit in on meetings and listen and learn,' she says. 'I'm still finding my footing in that area.' She also tries to make sure other young cast members feel heard. 'Season 2 is bigger, bolder, gorier, and a bit darker,' she says. 'It's sillier in the best way possible.' The show's move from Bucharest to Dublin may have influenced the shift as well, at least for her. 'Dublin was incredible,' she says. 'I loved everything about that experience, the cast, the crew. It was so sweet and so awesome. That island is so beautiful.'
On days when they weren't filming, Ortega explored Ireland with her hair and makeup artist, Nirvana, and her assistant, Lizzie. 'On weekends, we'd go down to Kerry and Cork and Donegal and swim in thunderstorms,' she says. Normally, when traveling for work, she would find her café and her bookshop and that was that. But her friends pushed her to get out more. 'I spent a lot of time laying in fields, going on hikes with my dog. I was raising chinchillas, and I'd read books with my chinchillas in my lap. Maybe I'd go to a karaoke bar one night or host a dinner at my place—things like that. I tried to make it feel as family-like as possible.'
There are ways in which Wednesday has felt like a double-edged sword for Ortega. The role rubbed off on her in good ways. 'I definitely feel like I have a bit more Gothic taste than I did when I was a teenager,' she says. 'I've always been into dark things or been fascinated by them, but I was a Disney kid, and the whole thing is being bubbly and kind and overly sweet.' She plays the cello now—as well as the synth. She knows how to fence. But if Wednesday helped change people's perception, Ortega once again finds herself in a tricky spot in her career: 'I'm doing a show I'm going to be doing for years where I play a schoolgirl,' she says. 'But I'm also a young woman.'
When I check in with Ortega a week later over Zoom, I relay Portman's sympathetic frustrations over being a child star who grew into a not-so-tall adult star. 'I relate to that so immensely, and it's always been really annoying, because you just don't feel like you're being taken seriously,' she says. 'You know, it's like how you're dressed in the schoolgirl costume. … There's just something about it that's very patronizing. Also, when you're short, people are already physically looking down on you.'
Boys get away with more. 'But girls,' she says, 'if they don't stay as this perfect image of how they were first introduced to you, then it's 'Ah, something's wrong. She's changed. She sold her soul.' But you're watching these women at the most pivotal times in their lives; they're experimenting because that's what you do.'
Sometimes that's about throwing yourself into a new role and giving yourself another chance to stretch and subvert expectations. For Ortega, that comes with another chance to dive into research and watch movies, which is one of her favorite things to do. (While preparing for her role as a robot in Waititi's adaptation of Klara and the Sun, Ortega studied Buster Keaton's films. 'If I'm only paying attention to what's coming out now, then everyone's getting their inspiration from the same place,' she says.) Sometimes that's about escaping—to a farm in Iceland (one day) or an animal sanctuary in Ireland. Sometimes, it's just about caring for something else. Which brings us back to the chinchillas. Because, what?
When I ask Ortega about them, she launches into a story. 'I'd always wanted to pet a cow,' she says. Her eyes are wide and animated, and she seems in high spirits. She tells me how Nirvana and Lizzie surprised her with a visit to an animal sanctuary. 'I got to spend the day with cows, and I was thrilled,' she says. Then Eddie, the guy in charge of the sanctuary, introduced her to a family of neglected chinchillas in need of care. 'They had these bald patches,' she says. 'They were clearly struggling—just going through a really rough time. Eddie asked us if we wanted to hold them, and that's a very dangerous position to put a young woman in, because you give her a small furry animal, she will take it home with her.'
Ortega returned to the sanctuary the next day to pick up the family of chinchillas: a mother and two sons. 'Like, baby baby. Sons that were smaller than my palm,' she says. 'And I watched them grow into men.' The mother's name was Alma, 'a traditional, beautiful name from The Phantom Thread. There was a brother, Domhnall—which, you know, Irish name, had to do it, I was in Ireland. And the youngest one, kind of the favorite among castmates, was Basil. He was named after Basil Gogos, who was Tim Burton's favorite illustrator as a kid.' (Gogos was famed for his renderings of horror-movie characters for Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.)
'It was so exciting,' she says of caring for them. 'Their hair grew back. They took dust baths. I gave them a little swing.' They returned to the sanctuary when filming was over, but she did come home with a dog. 'She was the runt of her litter and had something weird going on with her eye. Apparently she was sick all the time. I was like, 'Don't worry, guys, I will take care of this dog.' No one asked, but she automatically became our mascot. I guess I just really like nursing things.'
It's easy to forget, especially when a character becomes a cultural touchstone so quickly, like Wednesday did, that Ortega is a 22-year-old trying to figure out who she wants to be in the world (and not, you know, Wednesday Addams). 'What's so strange about a character like Wednesday is that Wednesday is an outcast and an outsider—but she's also a pop-culture icon,' says Ortega. 'So, in a strange way, I feel like I've become a pop actor—if that makes sense. And that's something I never saw for myself.'
Taking on so many other films in a row allowed Ortega to 'feel like an actor again.' When she's not working, which these days is rare, Ortega is trying on different hats, different modes of creative expression ('I just tried painting a couple days ago; that was exciting and really scary'), and new ways of coping with the stress and anxiety of all of it. 'I've gotten into Transcendental Meditation, which is usually how I like to start my morning,' she says. 'I think I maybe handle my stress better, or I'm really indecisive, so maybe I'm just putting less pressure on those things.'
'I'm very grateful for my audience, ' Ortega says. 'And I want to be able to give back to them. But I also want to do things that are creatively fulfilling to me. So it's finding that balance of doing movies that they might be interested in and then doing movies that I'm interested in.' Right now, she's looking forward to roles that are 'older and bolder and different,' she says. 'And then I want to be able to line up all of my girls and see something different in all of them.'
Hair: Ward; makeup: Dick Page; manicure: Yoko Sakakura for OPI; production: One Thirty-Eight Productions; set design: BG Porter
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