Why Jenna Ortega ‘Really Put Her Foot Down’ With ‘Wednesday’ Line Changes

Tomás Mier
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The 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards - Arrivals - Credit: Gilbert Flores/Variety/Getty Images
The 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards - Arrivals - Credit: Gilbert Flores/Variety/Getty Images

Jenna Ortega let go of her people-pleasing tendencies when she signed up to play Wednesday‘s titular role. In a comedy actress roundtable for The Hollywood Reporter, the Latina star spoke openly about fighting to be heard as a young actor and “putting her foot down” when it came to changing some lines in the show.

“Any of the best teams or environments that I’ve been on … have been people who are very collaborative and wanted to hear different opinions because it’s very easy for people to get caught up in their own. I think a project is best when there are as many voices and ideas thrown out as possible,” Ortega said. “And I’ve had experiences in TV where I felt my voice wasn’t heard, that I was meant to be a puppet. I’ve been told on sets, ‘You wouldn’t know because you’re not a writer,’ or, ‘Just shut up and do your job.’ From 12 years old, I’ve been hearing things like that.”

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“But I was fortunate to be working with someone like Tim Burton, who pulled me in his trailer one day and said that he wanted to be a soundboard for my voice,” she continued. “So, every day, me, him, the writers, we’d get together in the morning and go through sides.”

Ortega explained that she’s now “really, really fortunate” to be joining the new season of Wednesday as a producer on the series, meaning she’ll have more of a say in the show’s decisions. She said she had approached joining Wednesday with “hesitance” since her voice hadn’t been heard in past shows.

“I think that because I’m someone who is very opinionated or because I know what it’s like to be a people pleaser in this industry, and I know how unhappy or how frustrating it’s been in the past, when I went into Wednesday I really put my foot down and made it clear that everything that I had to say mattered and was heard,” Ortega said.

“As the show went on, we all got a better feel for one another and it’s become a really collaborative experience, and I feel really lucky to be able to be in the room early next season and be talking about scripts and giving notes,” she continued.

Ortega’s new quotes about Wednesday lines came in a roundtable conversation with fellow comedy actresses Sheryl Lee Ralph, Natasha Lyonne, Elle Fanning, Ayo Edebiri, and Devery Jacobs for THR. Her comments about line changes arrive three months after she spoke to Dax Shepard on Armchair Expert about fixing lines in the script that did “not make sense for her character at all.”

“There was a line about, like, this dress she has to wear for a school dance and she said ‘Oh my God, I love it. I can’t believe I said that, I literally hate myself,'” Ortega said at the time. “I had to go, ‘No.’ There was times on that set I almost became unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines.”

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