Jenna Ortega is reflecting on her infamous 2023 comments about pushing back on initial scripts for hit Netflix series “Wednesday.”
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Prior to the Writers Guild of America strike, Ortega told Dax Shepard during his “ Armchair Expert ” podcast that she had to “put my foot down” and “ started changing lines ” that she disagreed with on set.
“Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega said at the time.
Of course, backlash ensued, from writers in the industry who, pre-strike, already felt disempowered.
Now, Ortega is telling Vanity Fair the full story behind her statements.
According to the actress, she wanted to be a producer on the show going into its first season. She is now a producer on Season 2 and collaborates again with “Wednesday” director and executive producer Tim Burton on sequel film “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
“I think it’s natural to be fearful of signing your life away and wanting some sort of agency or wanting confirmation that your voice would be heard,” Ortega said of joining the series. “I’m aware of my position as an actor. I know that I’m not in charge….But I think with someone like Wednesday, who is in every scene, it only makes sense for that person to be that involved in what’s going on behind the scenes because she’s onscreen every second of the project.”
She continued, “And then I think a lot of the work that I ended up doing, and a lot of the conversations that I was having were more of a producer’s conversations half the time.”
Those kinds of “producer’s conversations” included script changes.
“To be fair, I think I probably could have been…I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that,” Ortega admitted about sharing her concerns from production publicly after Season 1 aired. “I think, oftentimes, I’m such a rambler. I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better.”
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Ortega added that she even “got sick of myself” in 2023 for being so viral.
“Everything that I said felt so magnified….It felt almost dystopian to me,” Ortega said. “I felt like a caricature of myself.”
The “Scream” alum continued, “You’re never going to please everybody, and as someone who naturally was a people pleaser, that was really hard for me to understand. Some people just may not like you…and that’s entirely fine. I got sick of myself last year. My face was everywhere…so it’s like, fair enough, if I were opening my phone and I saw the same girl with some stupid quote or something, I would be over it too.”
As for starring in and producing “Wednesday” Season 2, Ortega teased that the show is “little bit more horror-inspired ” than its debut installment. The actress cited 1964 film “The Masque of the Red Death” as an inspiration for the new storyline.
“There’s definitely the pressure of, ‘Oh, I have to get this right,'” Ortega said of following up the hit Season 1.
However, Season 2 does have some more overt changes: in addition to new cast members Steve Buscemi, Thandiwe Newton, and Haley Joel Osment, series supporting star Percy Hynes White was fired from the show after he was accused of sexually assaulting an underage woman. Hynes White denied the rumors ; he stars in Sundance breakout film “My Old Ass.”
Ortega explained that Hynes White’s series exit led to a “weird redirect” for the show.
“But we’re introducing so many different characters that I think it kind of will get lost,” Ortega said, while her character Wednesday’s “world does feel slightly askew anyway.”
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