Jenna Ortega talked to Vanity Fair about her controversial comments on Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’ in March 2023. She said she should’ve chosen her words better back then.
Ortega admitted that her comments caused a lot of backlash. She felt like her words were blown out of proportion to make her look bad. She realized it was impossible to make everyone happy and accepted some people might not like her:
“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 if I had 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’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 she got tired of seeing herself everywhere and understood why others might feel the same.
She Received Backlash For Changing Lines On Her Own
In the original interview on the ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast, Ortega said she often changed her character’s lines because she thought they didn’t make sense:
“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 when 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.”
Her comments upset many writers in Hollywood. They criticized her for changing lines without asking the writers first. Some writers even carried signs during a strike that said, ‘Without writers, Jenna Ortega will have nothing to punch up!’
Ortega is now working as a producer on the second season of ‘Wednesday.’ The new season is expected to come out on Netflix in 2025.
