Jenna Ortega Does Wednesday Addams Her Way
Jenna Ortega had an idea that was too dark, for even Wednesday Addams. The actress, who plays the iconic character in the new Netflix series Wednesday, wanted to pretend to hang herself, Harold and Maude-style, during an early scene in which Wednesday’s parents Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Gomez (Luis Guzmán) are canoodling in a car.
“I was going to strangle myself in the backseat and just be thrashing around while this really sweet serenade was happening. You could see me kicking and punching in the background and then I would just freeze and stop,” Ortega tells me over the phone. “It’s within the first couple of minutes of the show and I thought it would be good—and I was shot down immediately. ‘We cannot make jokes like that.’”
In the past year, Ortega has emerged as the queen of the new generation of scream queens. She began 2022 getting attacked by Ghostface in the latest Scream sequel, was a member of the crew of pornographers victimized by a horny old lady in X, and she’s now taking on the Goth girl all others aspire to be in Wednesday, a teen-centered take on Charles Addams’s morbid cartoon character.
Of course, Wednesday is not doing any screaming—she’s hoping others react that way to her presence. The braid-wearing menace is a natural fit for Ortega, for whom the Wednesday comparisons started long before she got cast in the role. “I think it’s because I can be pretty deadpan sometimes, and very, very sarcastic,” she says. “I have a darker sense of humor and I’m interested in darker things. I’m into gore.”
Her love of all things horror took root when she was around 13 years old—when she started watching the likes of Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and Halloween. But the Coachella Valley native decided to get into acting at age six, when she saw the Denzel Washington thriller Man on Fire and declared she wanted to be the “Puerto Rican Dakota Fanning.” (Why was a 6-year-old watching a Tony Scott movie? “Yeah, my mother asked me the same question,” she says. The story goes that her older sister was watching; Ortega sat on her lap and became entranced.)
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