Jenna Ortega found herself at the center of a little controversy last year when he said that she would rewrite her own lines on Netflix’s Wednesday series without consulting the writers. While recently speaking with Vanity Fair, she confessed that she could have chosen her words a little more carefully.
“I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that. I think, oftentimes, I’m such a rambler,” Ortega said.
“I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better.“
Ortega continued, “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. [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 Wednesday actress made her “rewriting” statements during an episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. “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. Everyhing that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega said. “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 where 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.“
Over the course of the season, Ortega grew very protective of the Wednesday character. “You can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you. When you are little and say very morbid, offensive stuff, it’s funny and endearing. But then you become a teenager and it’s nasty and you know it. There’s less of an excuse.“
The second season of Wednesday started production in May, but Ortega will next be seen in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which hits theaters on September 6th in the U.S.