During a March 2023 appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Ortega said that she took it upon herself to rewrite lines of dialogue without first consulting the series’ writers . Seventeen months later, the Netflix star is opening up about causing an Internet uproar, suggesting not that she was wrong, but that she could have chosen her words more carefully.
“I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that. I think, oftentimes, I’m such a rambler,” she tells Vanity Fair . “I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better.
“Everything that I said felt so magnified…. It felt almost dystopian to me,” she says of the controversy. “I felt like a caricature of myself…. 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. [In fact] 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.”
During that infamous podcast interview, Ortega recalled moments on set when she “became almost unprofessional” in how much she changed lines. “Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” she argued. “The script supervisor thought I was going with something, and then I had to sit down with the writers, and they’d be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ I’d have to go and explain why I couldn’t go do certain things.”
The Emmy-nominated actress said at the time that she “grew very, very protective” of Wednesday Addams during Season 1, which inspired script changes to ensure both the show’s believability and Wednesday’s likability. “You can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc, because then it’s boring and nobody likes you,” she told Shepard. “When you are little and say very morbid, offensive stuff, it’s funny and endearing. But then you become a teenager, and it’s nasty and you know it. There’s less of an excuse.”
Wednesday Season 2, on which Ortega is now a producer, started production in May. A release date has not been announced as of press time.
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