Jenna Ortega Won’t Be Boxed In

It was 10 p.m. and Jenna Ortega was alone at the gym, techno music blaring, stage blood still dripping from her ears. She was in Dublin, 5,000 miles from her Los Angeles home, shooting the third season of Netflix’s Addams family spin-off, Wednesday, while simultaneously training to play an elite gymnast in the forthcoming movie Nasty. The Wednesday set that day had involved blood rigs—tubes that spurt crimson-colored syrup—and it had run two hours over. But, Ortega had calculated, “if I get in the car quickly and I don’t rinse off all the way, I can probably get my session in.”

Ortega is telling me this at Chez Jeannette, an unfussy café in the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis neighborhood of Paris, on a disturbingly warm morning in September. Before Ortega arrived, I was nervous. Taika Waititi, who cast her as the lead in his new adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 dystopian novel Klara and the Sun, described Ortega to me as “beautifully intimidating.” Tim Burton, who has directed her in Wednesday and in his 2024 Beetlejuice sequel, told me she has “a gaze that burns, like a laser beam, the back of your head.”

Ortega has chosen an old-school bistro with burnished mirrors and red leather banquettes and laminated cocktail menus on the table. She is exactly on time for our 10 a.m. meeting. (The waiter assumed our reservation was for 10 p.m., because who would bother with a morning booking here?) She greets me with a hug—more warm smiles than piercing stares—and sits down on the scuffed chair opposite me, unfazed by my choice of the quietest location, which happens to be next to the toilet. A choice that turns out to have been prudent: She is so soft-spoken that, throughout the interview, I occasionally panic that when I eventually listen back to the recording, her voice won’t be audible over the pop music and clattering plates.

Ortega is known for her theatrical fashion choices on the red carpet—she wore a Balmain gown made of metal rulers to last year’s Met Gala and had to be clamped in by a blacksmith backstage—but today she is wearing a plain black T-shirt from a secondhand shop (a “nothing shirt” she bought to wear while painting the kitchen of her home), black cargo capri pants, and flip-flops. (“She’s not vain at all,” says stylist Enrique Melendez, who has been working with Ortega since she was 14.) Her nails are currently painted black for Wednesday, but she prefers to keep them bare. “It’s so much upkeep,” she says. “In my day-to-day life, I’m very practical, very comfortable. I’m a very low-maintenance person.”

Ortega, 24, does not have the résumé of a low-​maintenance person. Over the past few years, she has appeared in a string of horror films, from franchise stalwarts to indie upstarts. She joined the Scream franchise as Tara Carpenter, Ghostface’s first target in the series relaunch; was trapped in a sadistic farmer’s cellar in the A24 slasher film X; and descended into the nightmarish Netherworld in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. She is currently not only starring in but executive producing Wednesday, which is the most-watched English-language Netflix series of all time.

The character of Wednesday “has had such a profound impact on my life,” Ortega says. “It’ll always be something people think of when they see me.” Ortega’s Wednesday Addams—a Sartre-quoting, graveyard-loving misfit at a school for magical “outcasts”—has inspired Halloween costumes, tattoos, and viral memes. The rare teen-girl protagonist who is outspoken, vindictive (she drops live piranhas into the pool where her brother’s bullies are swimming), and entirely indifferent to the approval of her peers, Wednesday has been embraced as an unlikely Gen Z role model.

But by this time next year, it’s hard to imagine that anyone will think of Ortega purely as a genre actress: She is increasingly choosing projects that match her own taste for the risky and the surreal and push her beyond gothic tween or manic pixie scream queen. First there is her role as Klara, the titular robot in Waititi’s new film, out this fall. Klara is—in both Ishiguro’s and Waititi’s portrayal—temperamentally the opposite of Wednesday: endlessly cheerful and expressive where Wednesday is deadpan and cynical. As an “artificial friend” built to provide constant support to a human child, Klara is “all about using her face, using her eyebrows, to show that she’s trying so hard to do right,” Ortega says. (Wednesday, meanwhile, smiles in only a handful of episodes.)

Klara is purchased for Josie, a lonely teenager with a mysterious illness, and goes to live with her on a remote estate in the country. A clumsy, out-of-date model, Klara stumbles like a toddler as she learns to navigate the world outside the toy store. “Jenna has this ability to attack the physicality of a role that is very impressive to me,” says Amy Adams, who plays Josie’s mother. The first time Waititi met Ortega, he compared the blurring of boundaries between Klara and Josie—Klara mimics Josie’s gait and tries on her clothes—to the possessive relationship between an ailing actress and her nurse in Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona. “She was like, ‘Oh, I love Persona,’ ” says Waititi. “And I was like, ‘Okay, a young person who’s seen Persona—that’s fucking cool.’ ”

Ortega orders a black Americano and drinks it quickly as she walks me through what has brought her to Paris in the first place—it’s not a quick weekend getaway from the grueling Wednesday filming schedule, but rather a meeting with Leos Carax, the French art house director whose next movie she will star in. She tells me she discovered Carax when she was 15. His Holy Motors—which has been called incomprehensible by professional critics—“completely changed my perception of what movies can be,” she says. “Anything in that surrealist realm is super fascinating to me.”

Early success and early fame can sometimes impart a kind of cultural tunnel vision—an inability to look beyond the next project, or an insecurity when speaking beyond what’s coming up. But Ortega seems genuinely enthused by the prospect of stretching her limits. Growing up, she wanted to be, at various points, the president of the United States, an archaeologist, and an investigative journalist. She lights up when she describes the thrill of researching a character or learning a skill—fencing and archery for Wednesday; now gymnastics for her role in Nasty, which tells the story of a gymnastics prodigy and her overbearing coach (played by Rose Byrne). She laughs as she recalls her pride in mastering a new routine on the beam, only to be told by her coach that it’s the one typically assigned to eight-year-olds.

“She’s done so much work,” says Mary Bronstein, the director of Nasty, which will begin filming this fall. Ortega knew she wanted to work with Bronstein after she saw the director’s harrowing If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025), about a mother (also played by Byrne) unraveling under the strain of her daughter’s illness. It’s a film that thrums with visceral anxiety—much of it tied to the ceaseless demands of parenting and the tensions of a toxic marriage, not necessarily themes you’d imagine resonating with a 24-year-old. “But has been put in some little boxes,” says Bronstein. “I think that there are things that are in there that haven’t been brought out…. She has a poise to her that I’ve seen few people in their 40s or even 50s have.”

Ortega decided she wanted to become an actor—specifically, the Puerto Rican Dakota Fanning (she is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent)—at the age of six, after being captivated by Fanning’s performance in Man on Fire. The fourth of six kids growing up in a “small, tumbleweed-esque city” in the Coachella Valley, about two hours east of LA, she began petitioning her parents to let her attend auditions. They resisted—her mother, Natalie, had grown up reading tabloid horror stories about child actors—and tried to appease her with a book of monologues. This backfired: Jenna devoured the book, memorizing several of the speeches, and Natalie was so tickled by one of Jenna’s dramatic recitations that she posted a clip to her friends on Facebook.

When the video somehow caught the attention of a casting director, her parents relented, and Natalie, an emergency room nurse, began shuttling Jenna back and forth to LA for auditions several days a week. Jenna booked commercials for Colgate and McDonald’s; played a shooting victim on CSI: NY; and then, at 12, landed the lead in the Disney Channel sitcom Stuck in the Middle. “I wanted to do it so desperately,” Ortega says.

Still, she says—after a long pause—“I don’t think I would start someone that young.” She has said that she would sometimes go all day on set without eating or drinking. There should be “less of a workhorse expectation put on these kids,” she says. While she felt protected by her mother, it’s a “very susceptible environment for things to get confused.” And when Wednesday blew up in 2022, Ortega felt profoundly disoriented. Children stopped her in the street; she saw her own face on T-shirts. There was “no one really showing you the ropes.”

She would now advise a child who wanted to act to instead develop their creative horizons. As an actor, “you need things to pull from.” She is grateful that her parents insisted she play team sports as long as possible, for example, but she still had an unusual childhood. She has portrayed a high school student in several movies, but she left conventional high school at 14. Though Ortega knew almost nothing about gymnastics when she opened the script for Nasty two years ago, the project has offered her a rare opportunity to examine her own trajectory. Her character, she says, “felt like she had to perform from a very young age. There were a lot of things I could understand.”

A few days later, I get on a Zoom with Ortega. Even in her enthusiasms, she had been so composed—taking the time to collect her thoughts before she responded to each question—that I had wondered if she was imagining how her words would appear in print. This would have been understandable given her years as a working actor, the degree of fame she vaulted into, the scrutiny she elicits. It was only at the end of the interview at the café that she became chattier: asking about my plans in Paris, if I liked London—where I live—how I met my husband, and, wasn’t it funny, she was just talking to someone else who met their partner on Hinge.

I hoped to reach this more open Ortega in our second conversation. She’s still in Paris for the call; the Wednesday team is there working on some off-camera prep. She’s sitting perched on a windowsill, the Paris street behind her, while we speak. She’s wearing no jewelry or makeup—her freckles are visible across her eyelids, her hair tucked behind her ears—and, again, a plain black T-shirt.

“There’s a lot of different trains rolling in my brain at the same time,” she tells me. Ortega was seven when she realized there was something different about the way her mind worked. She was waking up early, before her siblings, to perform a specific routine every morning before school. “I had to open the bedsheet a certain way, and open the drawer one way, and brush my hair in a slow-paced way.” She now recognizes that behavior as an early manifestation of obsessive compulsive disorder, which continues to impact her life. Sometimes, if she’s tired or jet-lagged or anxious about an upcoming job, “I just bite the bullet and do the routine”: repeating the phrase “take care” a specific number of times throughout the day; stepping onto set with her left foot first; holding her breath and counting to 71. She’s tried to reframe OCD as a game, which “helps to take some of the pressure off.” She’s tried medication. She’s worked with a therapist, and still sometimes does. Her career can be stressful, but it’s also a reprieve. When the cameras are rolling, “you have to breathe. That’s another reason why I like my job.”

While Ortega has been open about her anxiety and mental health struggles, she fiercely protects her privacy in other areas. When I try to inquire about her romantic life—unlikely that she was using Hinge—she deflects. “I don’t think I’ll ever approach that part of my life, my personal life, with the public,” she says firmly. Even some who know her well find her guarded. “She’s actually very mysterious to me,” says Waititi. “I never met Audrey Hepburn, but I imagine she could have been a good contemporary of hers.”

“We both don’t let a lot of people into our circle,” agrees Maddie Ziegler, Ortega’s close friend and costar in The Fallout, a 2021 indie hit about the aftermath of a high school shooting. “We are introverts, at the end of the day.” Ortega’s close relationships with her parents and siblings are one of her main sources of stability; she FaceTimes them when she’s abroad and sees them whenever she is in LA. She also credits her whippet terrier mix—whom she adopted in Dublin—with helping her feel grounded in foreign cities. (Ortega’s dog has joined her for stints in Paris and London.) “I spend a lot of time in dog parks, with the dog community,” she says. “I meet familiar faces there.”

She also maintains firm boundaries around her own relationship with her public image. She does not watch her own movies. She does not read reviews—“I think that that would send me into a psychosis of some sort”—or open the box office updates her team sends. “I don’t want it to become a numbers thing,” she says. She only encounters chatter about her movies through word of mouth or Instagram, “which I’m on less and less,” she says. “So much of what you see on there nowadays is just garbage AI.” Anyway, she says, “we all look at ourselves too much.” (There was a mirror behind my head during our meeting at Chez Jeannette, but she didn’t appear to glance at her reflection once.) Her phone recently broke, she tells me, and she waited a few days before getting it fixed. “If I needed to get somewhere, if I had a workout class, I would look at a map on the computer, memorize the streets. If somebody needed me, I’m like, ‘Well, I’m gonna be at this café at this time.’ And that was so freeing.”

The past year has offered her space to figure out what she’s invested in—and that itself has been a kind of freedom. “I want to be in environments that are stimulating and productive, but also just telling stories that I would want to watch.” She would like to try theater: “You get to be immersed in a different way.” When I ask about her dream role—a question that typically yields an answer like Hedda Gabler or Juliet—she describes a minor character in Sam Shepard’s 1978 rural drama Buried Child: a young woman who taunts her boyfriend’s disabled uncle with his own prosthetic leg. “I just thought it was kind of an insane thing for her to do,” Ortega says. I point out that a director might prefer that she play the lead. “It would be nice to just do this one scene,” she says. “I don’t need to be at the forefront of everything.”

Nasty is her “first baby” as a producer. She discovered the script—by Isabella Jarosz, a first-time writer in her 20s—in a batch from her agent. “The joy and the fulfillment” of assembling a creative team, which happens to be all women, “just wasn’t anything I was expecting.” She would love to direct too, but only once she feels “there’s something I need to say. I don’t want to do it prematurely.”

“I think I have a little more understanding of myself and what I need to work,” Ortega says—which includes time at home in LA. Last year, she found herself with an unexpected three-month hiatus after the Wednesday filming schedule was postponed. It was the longest break she’d had since she was 16. At first “it was terrifying.” But she found her rhythm: reading books and plays (current favorites include Federico García Lorca and Flannery O’Connor), going on hikes with her dog, hanging out with friends and family, watching two movies a day. “It sounds really mundane, but that stuff’s not always normal to me.”

“I would love to slow down a bit,” she says. But when I ask her what slowing down might entail, she describes studying abroad, learning about musical composition, or trying photography. “I do think I’m somebody who always has to be moving.”

In this story: hair, Massimo Di Stefano; makeup, Mélanie Inglessis; tailor, Della George; manicurist, Yoko Sakakura.

Produced by Counsel. Set Design: Edith Di Monda.

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