20+ Facts About Jenna Ortega Who Played Wednesday and Invented the Dance Everyone Is Crazy About

Jenna Ortega has been acting since the age of 6, but she rose to fame when she turned 20 thanks to the role of Wednesday from the Addams family. She made up the dance for the ball scene herself, which got a lot of fans and became viral. Jenna is being called a Hollywood rising star with a great future.

• Jenna Ortega was born into a family with 6 children on September 27, 2002. She’s of Mexican and Puerto Rican ancestry.
• She’s been playing in movies since a young age, due to which she missed her high school prom and graduation. And she regrets that.
• Jenna decided to become an actress after watching the 2004 movie Man on Fire because she was impressed by Dakota Fanning’s acting. “I told my mom that I wanted to be the Puerto Rican version of Dakota Fanning,” she recalls.

Jenna and her family

• Jenna’s mother once posted a video of her daughter online with the caption, “My little drama queen.” A casting director spotted this video and invited Jenna for an audition. Sometime later, the young actress began to film commercials.
• Jenna’s debut movie was Iron Man 3, where she played the president’s daughter. “They cut my entire scene pretty much,” she says. “But there are 2 seconds where the screen is on me and my mom and my friends screamed in the theater.”
• A year later, in 2014, Jenna played the main character at a young age in the series Jane the Virgin.
  

In the movie The Massively Mixed-Up Middle School Mystery and series Jane the Virgin

• In 2016, Jenna landed a lead role in the TV show Stuck in the Middle where she played a prodigy girl with a lot of siblings. Before she became an actress, her family often watched the Disney Channel on TV, and Jenna once said that if her mom let her act, she would also appear on Disney Channel. Her mom replied, “Oh yes, we’ll see about that.” But it really happened.
• In one of the Stuck in the Middle episodes, the actress said a few prophetic words. In the series, Harley, who is the middle child of 7, tried to arrange a camping trip for her family. But when she found out that her siblings were busy on that day, she said, “This is what happens when there are 7 kids, and you’re stuck in the middle. If my family were a week, I would be Wednesday.”

In the series Stuck in the Middle

• The actress lent her voice to a few animated characters too. She played in Over the Garden Wall, Big City Greens, and Elena of Avalor.
• Jenna played Ellie in season 2 of the popular series You. It was the first serious role of her career, and this made her really nervous, “I thought that every day I went to the set, I was going to be fired for something I did wrong.”
• In 2021, the movie Yes Day was released, where Jenna played the older daughter of Jennifer Garner’s character.
• Fans of horror movies consider Jenna a scream queen because she’s played in a few movies of this genre: X, Scream 5, and The Babysitter: Killer Queen.
  

In the movies Yes Day and Scream 5

• When the actress auditioned for the role in the series Wednesday via video conference, she appeared wearing stage blood and glycerin sweat in her hair and a massive cut on her face because she was filming X in New Zealand and had been up for 24 hours. “I got on Zoom and Tim Burton actually laughed. It made me laugh. I thought it was endearing,” the actress recalled.
• Jenna Ortega was terrified when she learned that she would be playing alongside Christina Ricci, who portrayed Wednesday in the 1991 and 1993 renditions of The Addams Family. “She’s a really cool lady. I was fine meeting her, but her performance was flawlessly done, which is another reason it was hard for me to do this job,” Jenna shared.

Jenna with her co-stars Gwendoline Christie and Emma Myers on the set of Wednesday

• Jenna is a big fan of the series Stranger Things whose viewing record has been recently broken by Wednesday. “I follow everyone’s theories about the show, and I cannot get enough of it,” the actress says.
• Jenna used to be a vegan, but while filming the series Wednesday, which took place in Romania, she began to eat fish to balance her diet in a foreign country.
• Following Tim Burton’s recommendation, Jenna rarely blinked while playing Wednesday. According to the actress, this wasn’t easy, “I would have to restart a take if I started blinking. It was Romanian winter, and there was all this wind in my face. I learned to blink on other people’s lines.”

In the series Wednesday and on the red carpet

• Jenna revealed that she loves reading. In an interview, the actress said that she had read the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov because it was mentioned in the series You which she had a part in.
• In order to play the cello for Wednesday, she started working on the cello about 2 months before they started shooting.
• The actress has a few movie award nominations, including a Golden Globe for her performance in Wednesday.

Richard Shotwell / Invision / AP / East News, Richard Shotwell / Invision / AP / East News

Jenna in 2018 and 2022

• Jenna doesn’t speak about her personal life and doesn’t care about rumors much, “According to the Internet, I dated like 6 guys, but I’ve dated none of them.”
• In 2017, she appeared in the music video Chapstick for her friend, musician Jacob Sartorius.
• In 2020, the 18-year-old actress had her first book published. It was a collection of short stories titled, It’s All Love: Reflections For Your Heart & Soul.
• In December 2022, it became known that Jenna and Percy Hynes White, who played Xavier Thorpe in Wednesday, will reunite in the romantic comedy Winter Spring Summer or Fall, where Ortega will also serve as an executive producer.

Jenna and Percy Hynes White in the series Wednesday

• Jenna wants to become a film director in the future, but she’s currently focused on her acting career.
• A few new movies starring Ortega are planned to be released, including the horror movie Scream 6, the thriller Finestkind, and comedy-drama Miller’s Girl.

Have you watched Wednesday? Did you like it?

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