Jenna Ortega has put in the time, and she’s only 21 years old.
The actress made her on-screen debut in a cute video that her mom shared to Facebook when she was seven, followed by a series of commercials (including one for McDonald’s as “nugget girl”). Small roles in films and TV shows followed: a single episode of the blissfully forgotten Rob Schneider sitcom Rob; a brief appearance as the vice president’s daughter in Iron Man 3; young Jane in The CW’s wonderful Jane the Virgin. Ortega was doing enough — in a variety of mediums — that she caught the attention of Disney, which cast her in the lead role in the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle.
The family-friendly show about a creative young girl ran for three seasons, and Ortega could have easily graduated from Disney shows (she also did voice work in programs like Elena of Avalor and Big City Greens) to Disney movies. But it didn’t sound like the easiest work environment. “Kids would randomly start fighting because their parents were fighting,” Ortega shared on a 2023 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast. “So even though the kids had no problem with each other, because the parents did, they would side with one another. We had therapy sessions, like collectively, cast therapy sessions.”
After dealing with all that, no wonder she pivoted to horror.
“I love horror films. I don’t know what it is about having blood thrown on your face and running around screaming bloody murder, but it really is so therapeutic.”
Ortega knew at a young age what she wanted to do (if you didn’t watch the video from before, please do so now), and she’s drawn to others with a similar level of determination for their craft. “Everyone who works on horror sets loves horror,” she said with admiration on The Tonight Show. 2020’s horror comedy The Babysitter: Killer Queen was followed by the confusingly titled Scream, the Foo Fighters-starring Studio 666, bloody satire American Carnage, and Texas Chain Saw Massacre-meets-porn slasher X, all in 2022. She was in her scream queen era, and it was another horror project that catapulted her to the A-list.
Fan castings are wishful thinking at best and “John Krasinski as Mister Fantastic” at worst, but Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams is the rare exception to the rule: the actress not only looked (and danced) the part, she also perfectly embodied the character’s sardonic morbidity.
The first season of Wednesday remains Netflix’s most popular English-language series of all-time, and second biggest overall behind only Squid Game. But more importantly, it got Ortega on the radar of the show’s frequent director and producer, Tim Burton, who cast her in the upcoming Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the daughter of Winona Ryder’s goth girl icon, Lydia Deetz.
I recently re-watched the original Beetlejuice and was struck by Ryder’s pose at such a young age. She was only 15 while filming the comedy-horror classic, and while Ortega was older while making the sequel, she has a similar command of the screen; she seems wise beyond her years. Ryder locked on to this, and she was “warm and welcoming and kind and inviting” to Ortega and provided advice as her career was taking off.
Ortega won’t reveal the specific guidance she got from Ryder, but it was probably something along the lines of: take chances. In 1990, when she was around the same age as Ortega is now and having already starred in Beetlejuice, Mermaids, and Edward Scissorhands (with performances in Martin Scorsese, Gillian Armstrong, and Francis Ford Coppola films soon to come), Ryder was informed by her agents that if she starred in Heathers, her career would be over. So what did Ryder do? She changed agents. “It’s so simple,” she said. “You do what makes you proud.”
Ortega is doing what makes her proud, whether it’s starring in horror flicks, wading into riskier material, or murdering and making out with Sabrina Carpenter. Like Ryder before her, she won’t let herself be pigeonholed as just one thing: Hollywood’s resident goth girl. There’s nothing wrong with that (there is always a need for goth girls!), but as Ortega told Who What Wear, “I want to expand my muscles as an actor, and I want to grow.”
That’s clear from her upcoming projects beyond Wednesday season 2. There’s science fiction (Klara and the Sun, director Taika Waititi’s adaptation of author Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel), dark comedy (A24’s Death of a Unicorn, about a father and his daughter, played by Paul Rudd and Ortega, who accidentally hit and kill a unicorn), and whatever Krisha and It Comes at Night filmmaker Trey Edward Shults is cooking with The Weeknd (a “loose remake” of Misery???).
Ortega will continue making horror movies “until I die,” but her willingness to seek out other genres is an exciting evolution in the career of one of Hollywood’s best young actresses.