Jenna Ortega Protected Her 'Wednesday' Character, Even If It Meant Being 'Unprofessional'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 9, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 9, 2023 |

Jenna Ortega is great in Scream, she made Wednesday endurable, and based on how much they are watching Stuck in the Middle, I am sure one of my kids has a crush on her. I also think that it’s brave when anyone stands up for their art, much less someone as young as Jenna Ortega. At least someone is not quietly going along with the Netflix algorithm.

“Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega told Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, referring to the writing on Wednesday. “Her being in a love triangle made no sense. There was a line about like, this dress that she has to wear for a school dance and she said, ‘Oh, my God, I love it. Ugh, I can’t believe I said that. I literally hate myself.’ And I had to go, ‘No, there’s no way.’”

She’s not wrong. Love triangles and Heathers-speak is not Wednesday Addams. She is looking out for her character. “There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional, in a sense, where I just started changing lines. The script supervisor thought that I was going with something, and then I would have to sit down with the writers and they would be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ And I would have to go through and explain why I couldn’t do certain things.”

“I grew very, very protective of [Wednesday], but you can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you.”

I love it, although I hope she doesn’t run afoul of the Wednesday writers for calling out their scripts. I’d hate for Wednesday Addams to find herself at the bottom of an elevator shaft, like Joey Tribbiani’s Dr. Drake Romeray in Friends, after Joey said in an interview that he made up his own lines.

Elsewhere, Ortega also has notes for the Please Don’t Destroy guys in her first SNL promo, where she reluctantly agrees to do the Wednesday Addams dance.

Ortego’s Scream VI opens this weekend, and she will host SNL on Saturday.