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In The Latest Entertainment News Of All Things Jenna Ortega
Since the premiere of Netflix’s Wednesday, fans have given great praise to Jenna Ortega and her take on the popular character.
Just in case you’re not familiar with who Wednesday Addams is, she’s a mainstream character from the black comedy series that originated in 1964.
Eventually modernized, the late Raul Julia (Gomez Addams) and Angelica Houston (Morticia Addams), helped revive the dark show for modern times on film.
However, the film’s franchise original Wednesday was played by the veteran actress, Christina Ricci. She instantly became a fan favorite for her quick one-liners without hesitation or second thought.
Ricci, who also appears in Netflix’s first season, was a must-see for both the 1991 and 1993 films. Those films cemented her into pop culture.
Now, Jenna Ortega has been able to capture that same essence, but with her own pizzaz and menacing personality without compromising the interest of real fans,
“You want to do something different. You don’t want to be ripping off anybody else’s performance,” she said during an interview. “We’ve never spent so much time with Wednesday on screen before, there has to be more dimension in order to push that story forward.”
Directed by the famed Tim Burton of Batman(1989) with Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton and Kim Basinger, Ortega wanted to ensure that she found a balance of originality without overdoing the role,
“I was very protective and I never wanted to give too much or too little,” she adds.
The young actress is joined by veteran and heavy-hitters such as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luiz Guzman. Wednesday develops a great relationship with the bright and sunshiny Enid Sinclair (Emma Myers) which adds a little “color,” if you will, in the teen’s dry delivery.
With a great cast surrounding her character, Ortega is still all about the horror and spooky aspect of this ghoulish and maybe even Halloween-themed series,
“Something that I appreciate about horror is that it’s kind of keeping theaters alive. I feel like people really go out to the theaters nowadays for superhero films or horror films,” she says.
The 20-year-old continued,
“You’re just giving people a good time. It’s adrenaline, it’s a roller coaster. I feel like horror is a large, just this conglomerate of genres in terms of, you have your horror and your action and then there’s comedy and then there’s drama and then there’s romance. I think that horror films are kind of everything at once, and that’s a really wonderful experience as an actor.”
She also expressed how important it was to keep elements of the film and portray it in the present,
“The 90s films made such an impact on the character Wednesday, the one that we know and love today. So I think that there was a part of my performance that I had to loop in bits and pieces that were reminiscent of the ‘90s version.”
As far as her infamous dance scene, Ortega admitted to NME Magazine, that she was battling COVID-19 to shoot episode four,
I felt like I’d been hit by a car and that a little goblin had been let loose in my throat and was scratching the walls of my [esophagus].”
She continued,
“[The staff] were giving me medicine between takes because we were waiting on the positive result.”
The Netflix show’s entire first season is currently streaming.
