Jenna Ortega once shared her candid feelings about her experiences during the production of the first season of Wednesday. One of the wildest admissions she made was when she said she started changing lines in the script without telling the writers.
There was a bit of a controversy over her comments and if you don’t remember what she said, here’s her quote: “I don’t think I’ve ever had to put my foot down more on a set in a way that I had to on Wednesday.
“Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all. Her being in a love triangle? It made no sense. There was a line about a dress she has to wear for a school dance and she says, ‘Oh my god I love it. Ugh, I can’t believe I said that. I literally hate myself.’
“I had to go, ‘No.’ There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines. 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?’ And I’d have to go and explain why I couldn’t go do certain things.”
Those comments struck a nerve with some professionals. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Jenna Ortega reflected on her comments about changing her character’s lines on Netflix’s Wednesday.
She admits: “I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that. 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.”
A lot of Hollywood writers took to social media calling out Ortega for being “toxic” and “beyond entitled,” and on the picket lines, some Writers Guild of America members carried signs with slogans such as “Without writers, Jenna Ortega will have nothing to punch up!”
Ortega went on to say: “Everything that I said felt so magnified … It felt almost dystopian to me,” Ortega, who is now 21 years old, told Vanity Fair. “I felt like a caricature of myself.”
She went on to talk about the lesson she learned from that experience, saying: “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.”
Ortega also said that even she got “sick of myself last year,” adding: “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.”
Wednesday executive producer and director Tim Burton talked about working with Ortega saying she’s “very direct. She’s very no-nonsense, and I find that very refreshing and beautiful and artistic.”
He even said that Ortega “could direct [the series] if she wanted to. I saw, from day one, she’s very aware. She’s more aware, sometimes, than I am.”
Ortega not only stars in Wednesady, but with Season 2, she serves as a producer where she is encouraged to give notes.
Wednesday Season 2 is expected to arrive on Netflix sometime in 2025.
