Jenna Ortega is suitably somber about Netflix’s Wednesday, and it’s causing quite a stir

Entertainment

Little did she know she was about to enter a nightmare.

The first season of Netflix’s Addams Family adaptation, Wednesday, was a smash hit in 2022, leading to an inevitable renewal for a subsequent season, as well as some of the most adorable fan creations you’ll ever see.

You’d think the people involved would be thrilled with his success, but the star at the heart of things isn’t quite so sure. In a recent interview with The Times UK, Jenna Ortega, the actress behind the titular Wednesday Addams, admitted it took a lot of convincing to even sign on.

“I received and forwarded the email,” Ortega said. “I had done so much TV in my life. All I ever wanted to do was film… You have to prove yourself. It’s only in the last three or four years that I’ve been able to start moving into film. I was afraid that signing on to another TV show would prevent me from doing other jobs that I really wanted and cared about.”

It was only thanks to the involvement of Tim Burton as executive producer that Ortega finally relented, and the project’s eventual success became a bone of contention that she didn’t particularly like.

“I thought it wouldn’t be observed,” she continued. “That it’ll be a nice little gem someone finds, but [most people don’t].”

When asked if she would have preferred it if the show hadn’t been quite as successful, Ortega said yes.

Her dislike of notoriety stems from her past history as a Disney star after her turn as Harley Diaz on the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle. Explaining that she’s been treated as a “people’s princess” and that she “doesn’t really feel like myself,” she welcomed a return to some degree of normality as her public image took a back seat.

Ortega has been fairly candid about Wednesdays in the past, taking no hits regarding the quality of the writing in an interview on the Armchair Expert podcast.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had to push as hard on a set as I did on Wednesday,” she revealed. “Everything [she] everything I had to play didn’t make any sense to her character at all. That she’s in a love triangle? It made no sense.

“There were times on this set where I even got almost unprofessional in a way, where I just started switching lines.”

Her outspokenness wasn’t widely appreciated across the industry, so Steven DeKnight (who has written and directed programs like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Spartacus) took to Twitter to hit her up.