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Jenna Ortega covers the September issue of Vanity Fair, all to promote Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton’s classic comedy. Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara have returned to their roles, and Jenna was cast perfectly as Winona’s goth daughter. While that’s the film she’s promoting, the bulk of the interview is about Wednesday, the hit Netflix show starring Ortega as Wednesday Addams. She’s filming the second season now in Ireland and it should be out next year… meaning a two-and-half year wait in between seasons? Insane. I enjoyed this interview because I root for Ortega, even if she sometimes says some weird things. She comes across as very sensitive and private. Some highlights:
Her life after ‘Wednesday’ became a monster success: “A majority of the last year and a half has felt very far from me.” She describes the experience almost like a sci-fi thriller: “very dissociative and alien and out-of-body. When people mention my name, it’s almost like my name has been taken from me. Now I just feel like I’m floating and…I’m up for interpretation.”
Her feelings on being a “celebrity”: Celebrity is “absolutely ridiculous. I remember feeling really wrong for resisting it… I think if anybody were in my shoes and reacted to it in a welcoming manner, there’s something severely wrong with you.”
Growing up in La Quinta, California: “I find myself constantly reaching back to what once was… I never had my own room growing up. And now I get to travel the world.”
Stepping foot on the ‘Beetlejuice’ set: “Every time I walked onto that set, I wanted to remember it for the rest of my life. You have Willem Dafoe in a trench coat, sliding down in a back pew, just watching everyone,” she says, while Ryder stood by with her pointy bangs of yore. Then Keaton materialized. “I remember feeling my soul leave my body for a second… And then in between takes, he’s sitting down and drinking his tea.”
At 18 years old, she wanted to be a producer on ‘Wednesday’: “I think it’s natural to be fearful of signing your life away and wanting some sort of agency or wanting confirmation that your voice would be heard. I’m aware of my position as an actor. I know that I’m not in charge…. But I think with someone like Wednesday, who is in every scene, it only makes sense for that person to be that involved in what’s going on behind the scenes because she’s onscreen every second of the project.” She says she was told that it wasn’t common for actors to produce in the first season of a series but that they could revisit the issue in season two. “And then I think a lot of the work that I ended up doing and a lot of the conversations that I was having were more of a producer’s conversations half the time.”
On the major backlash to her claims, last year, that she rewrote ‘Wednesday’ scripts and punched up her dialogue: “To be fair… I think I probably could have been….” Then she hesitates, dangling the longest silence of our interview. “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. Everything that I said felt so magnified…. It felt almost dystopian to me. I felt like a caricature of myself.”
You can’t please everybody: “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.”
The backlash to a young woman standing up for herself: “Women have to be princesses. They have to be elegant and classy and so kind and…then when they’re outspoken, they can’t be tamed and they’re a mess.”
On Wednesday’s Latin heritage: Ortega likes that Wednesday’s Latinness is “not being shoved down your throat. There’s nothing worse than when they have the side Mexican character who’s carrying the flag on their shoulder. We’re so much more than that.”
Her father is Mexican-American & her mother is Puerto Rican: “But then, oftentimes, you’re just not good enough. Because I wasn’t born in a Spanish-speaking country, I know people have a hard time connecting with me.” Ortega doesn’t speak Spanish fluently, nor does her father, but it was her mother’s first language. “I think there’s a part of me that carries a bit of shame. For a second I was almost nervous to speak about my family’s background because…I feel like I was made to feel like it wasn’t…” She stops short before saying “valid” or some variation thereof. “But also, something that I’m learning is…it’s not my job to carry the weight of everybody who’s ever had that experience.”
The thing about asking to be a producer on Wednesday in the first season, when she was only 18 years old, is so bold. It reminds me of an interview I read with Minnie Driver, where she was talking about her awe for the younger actresses standing up for themselves and stepping into a producer’s role really early in their careers. Minnie was like – my generation never did that and we should have, and it’s badass that the girls are doing it now. Anyway, Jenna is now a producer on Wednesday, as of Season 2. As for the Latin heritage stuff… I didn’t know that she doesn’t speak Spanish. If it wasn’t spoken at home, then yeah, she wouldn’t have picked it up. And I like that she represents the diversity of Latina experiences. Not every Latin actress has to play a trope or stereotype. There are goth Latinas. There are nerd Latinas. There are Latinas who don’t speak Spanish.
Cover & IG courtesy of Vanity Fair.
