Arka
Had it been up to Jenna Ortega, she would have spent the summer after Wednesday 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 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.”
