Jenna Ortega on Fame, Failure, and ‘Wednesday’ Season 3

It’s a uncommon sunny day the place Jenna Ortega is. There’s not a cloud within the sky, and a mild wind rustles the leafy branches over her head. The world is quiet. Peaceful. Wednesday Addams would despise it, however Ortega is basking in it.

The twenty-three-year-old Wednesday star is sitting in that heat summer season gentle after a protracted day of taking pictures season 3 of the macabre Netflix juggernaut. Right now, over Zoom, she appears to be like like Wednesday even away from the set, wrapped in a coal-colored sweater along with her naturally dark-brown hair dyed even darker. She’s been working in Dublin on the brand new episodes since February, enduring unpleasant Irish climate. On today in late June, nevertheless, the solar guidelines supreme, so Ortega makes use of the chance to place a bit of area between her and her grim alter ego.

People usually ask Ortega if she shares a lot in widespread with Wednesday, the sensible however dark-hearted daughter of the Addams household she started enjoying on the present in 2022. The reply: typically. “We mesh pretty well,” Ortega tells me. “But while I’m in production, going over scripts over and over again, and I’m there all day, every day, and in every scene . . . yeah, there’s times where I think like her. Maybe she peeks out a bit more, here and there.”

There’s in all probability a good quantity of Wednesday inside all of us, which is one purpose the sequence has grow to be such an immense world phenomenon, vaulting Ortega onto the A-list of actors from her era. She has balanced big-budget mainstream franchises like Scream and Beetlejuice with authentic thrillers like Miller’s Girl and offbeat surrealist tales like Death of a Unicorn. On the horizon are the title position in Taika Waititi’s robo-girl drama Klara and the Sun and J. J. Abrams’s sci-fi fantasy movie The Great Beyond.

Cape by Ann Demuelemeester; boa by Blumarine; earrings by Paspaley.

This article appeared within the September 2026 subject of Esquire
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“I’ve been in this experimental phase,” she says. “It’s only been in the last year or so—especially with the show coming to a head and getting ready to enter this next chapter in my life and career—that I’ve really honed in. I’ve seen some things now. I’ve tried some things. Now it’s important to me to be focused on stories and characters that I feel truly connected to.”

When not inhabiting the Wednesday abyss as she shoots new episodes, Ortega has tried to make use of her standing to take optimistic gambles. She’s gotten a style of runaway success, realized that not each experiment is a winner, and but continues to take dangers—even when she’s nonetheless determining which pictures are value taking.

One of these dangers is Klara and the Sun, based mostly on the best-selling novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, by which Ortega stars as an “Artificial Friend” robotic who explores the world with the broad eyes and open coronary heart of a new child. It hits theaters October 23 and performs with existentialist concepts about easy methods to have depth however nonetheless be completely happy. “It was very exciting for me to play this naive, hopeful, optimistic character who’s very different than the characters that I’ve been playing recently,” she says in an apparent nod to the cynical, skeptical Wednesday.

Ortega has quite a bit in widespread with Klara too, proper right down to each of them having a penchant for recharging within the daylight. “One of my favorite things about the book and what makes Klara so special is because she’s written as a back-of-the-store robot. She’s an old model,” Ortega explains. “She’s not a standout Artificial Friend. Or so you think.”

Dress, Givenchy by Sarah Burton. Necklace by Renato Cipullo.

That’s one other factor she hopes might be relatable to folks all over the place: Who hasn’t questioned whether or not they matter or felt left behind? Ortega definitely grappled with these doubts, particularly through the time she spent as a baby actor, enjoying bit components earlier than touchdown common appearances on TV reveals like Jane the Virgin, Stuck within the Middle, and the thriller You.

Now she has the facility to chart her personal means. Ortega has grow to be a touchstone for her era, a reality that also takes her aback given how lengthy and tough the street to success was. “That was a big learning lesson for me, because I started so young and it wasn’t easy coming up,” she says. “I was told many mixed things, and then suddenly I was catapulted into this weird liminal space that, hey, well, maybe things are a bit different for me now.”

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a blockbuster, made along with her Wednesday director and Gothic soulmate Tim Burton, and her two Scream motion pictures rejuvenated that self-aware slasher franchise. But not each challenge has been a house run. Hurry Up Tomorrow, the 2025 drama she made with the Weeknd as a companion piece to his sixth studio album, underwhelmed viewers and is basically often called a meme that pokes enjoyable on the musician’s considerably stiff appearing.

Ortega doesn’t pinpoint any particular regrets, however she acknowledges that she’s realized some classes the arduous means. “One hundred percent, yeah. I don’t know if I can ever categorize anything as a mistake,” she says. “Good or bad, you’re going to learn from it.”

Like most individuals at her level in life, Ortega says she’s figuring issues out. “I’ve gotten such a better understanding of who I am as a person and what I want from the world,” she says. “I wouldn’t have been able to get that understanding of my position had I not gone through phases of trial and error.”

Ortega’s new perspective fueled her work with J. J. Abrams, who introduced her aboard his extremely secretive new directing challenge, The Great Beyond, out in October 2027. According to a line from footage teased at CinemaCon final spring, the fantasy movie, which costars Glen Powell, Emma Mackey, and Samuel L. Jackson, is about “another world out of sight and sound.”

What Ortega beloved was that Abrams was harnessing his personal a long time of standing to create an authentic, high-concept story—having already delved so deeply into franchise territory with the Star Wars and Star Trek motion pictures. “He’s very intentional with everything,” Ortega says. “The character that I play is a lost young person in a new city. [She has] a confusing history and finds a friend in Glen Powell’s character . . . and that’s pretty much all I could say!”

Ortega can’t assist however reveal yet one more element: “She’s very knowledgeable about one thing. This is her obsession. She’s quite manic the way that she loves this thing, and it takes over her whole personality. So it was nice for me to play somebody who’s just obsessed with something like that. A freak in a different way.”

Jacket and costume by Dior. Sandals by Jeffrey Campbell.

Acting turned Ortega’s personal obsession early on. Before her age had hit double digits, she knew she wished to be a performer. Jenna was the fourth of six kids. Her mom, Natalie, was an emergency-room nurse, whereas her father, Edward, was a sheriff’s deputy. With so many youngsters to handle and demanding jobs of their very own, her dad and mom needed to put money into her dream as a lot as she did.

Ortega says they have been unwaveringly supportive, taking her repeatedly on the 130-mile drive from their residence in Coachella Valley, out within the central desert of California, to auditions in Los Angeles. She landed her first film position—a bit half because the vice chairman’s disabled daughter in Iron Man 3—at age 9.

She shared the scene with an enormous teddy bear and the late actor Miguel Ferrer, enjoying her double-crossing politician father. The character is lacking her proper foot, so she tucked it up underneath her costume. “I had sat on my leg all day at work, and I limped all the way to the car with smiles and tears running down my face. I was just so happy to have been on a movie set. I refused to leave the wheelchair, because if somebody needed me, I wanted to be ready.”

Ortega had turned ten by the point the film got here out in May 2013, and though her spoken traces have been minimize, her mere look in such an enormous Hollywood tentpole turned a group celebration at her native multiplex in Rancho Mirage, California. Her complete household turned out, together with a handful of her faculty associates and a few of her mother’s emergency-room colleagues. Since Iron Man 3 was enjoying on a number of screens with staggered begin occasions, they’d watch the film till she appeared about midway by, then go away to see her huge second once more.

Cape by Ann Demuelemeester. Shorts and boa by Blumarine. Sandals by Gianvito Rossi. Earrings by Paspaley.

“We were hopping from theater to theater to watch the same part of the movie,” she says. “It was really sweet. My friends and family would run in and stand on the side of the theater and then everyone would cheer and scream and we’d go, Ahhhhh! Then we would run over to the next one and do the same thing—repeatedly.”

She remembers how surreal it felt, seeing herself twenty toes tall. But that wasn’t the weirdest half. “I actually don’t even think I was looking at the screen,” she says. “I was looking at the audience. I just thought, Ooh, this is bizarre. These people have seen my face now. It felt like a breaking of the fourth wall.” She laughs, shaking her head. “I was quite existential at the time.”

This second additionally made her notice what she beloved most about appearing. The better part wasn’t being on set, though she beloved that too. The satisfaction got here in seeing everybody else’s response. She says it made her notice how a lot others had sacrificed to place her on that display.

“The thrill wasn’t for me. It was the fact I had begged my mom to let me do this thing,” she says. “To see my family get excited about something that I was able to accomplish, because I was stubborn and persistent enough to have made them proud, that was what was exciting to me.”

That reminiscence appears very pure, however issues get sophisticated whenever you vault into fame. People mine your life for controversy, and artistic misfires can really feel extra damaging than struggling to succeed. She’s making an attempt to fuse the enjoyment with the risk-taking, endlessly recalculating.

Cape by Ann Demuelemeester. Boa by Blumarine.

That’s nonetheless what she loves about this work: when it connects with others. The satisfying factor about Wednesday is the best way her character has resonated with tens of millions of individuals world wide, throughout cultures, and amongst folks of all ages. Wednesday Addams feels a “brutal inner turmoil of angst and upset and confusion at the world,” Ortega says. Who can’t relate to that?

But there’s additionally one thing comforting about her confidence. “Wednesday is very aware of who she is, the world that she lives in, and what she wants out of it,” Ortega says. “Anytime anyone is just undeniably themselves, it’s quite magnetic.”

Although folks usually assume she and Wednesday are very related, she says that the one who’s truly closest to the character is Tim Burton himself. “Tim talked about it all the time,” she says. “He was like, ‘Well, she’s kind of . . . me.’ He’s much more shy than her. She’s much more obvious about the way that she feels.”

Now that the present is three seasons alongside and she and Burton have made a film collectively, she sees the 2 of them—the filmmaker and Wednesday herself—extra clearly than ever. “I got a better understanding of Tim and who he was and what he found funny and charming and interesting through the character,” Ortega says. “The more I learned about him, the more I realized what Wednesday represented. Or what she could be.”

Wednesday will quickly be questioning that herself. Season 3 of the present isn’t anticipated to debut till later in 2027, however Ortega says issues are much less sure for the character this time round. She’s questioning all the things. Even greater than ordinary.

“This season, especially because the kids are seniors in high school now, we’re dealing with more confrontational feelings regarding family and what it means to be an adult and what you see for your life,” she says. “It’s not really until you get to the precipice of adulthood that you start to realize, Oh, God, well, maybe I’ve got to have a plan.”

Ortega is aware of that feeling. Or did. “Not that that ever really goes away,” she says. There could also be sunny days forward, however shadows at all times have a means of creeping in.

As seen within the opening picture: Jacket and costume by Dior. Earrings and ring by
Sauer.

Jenna Ortega is carrying Dior Makeup and Rouge Dior On Stage Matte Lipstick all through.

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