On the eve of Wednesday’s cultural domination, “Tim” invited Jenna Ortega to his house for a meeting.

I love when this happens in Hollywood conversations: casually, not even pretentiously, legends referred to by first names only, as Ortega does over a clandestine morning coffee. Here is Wednesday on a Sunday at Velvet, a moody cocktail bar at the Corinthia hotel in London.

Dress by Dior; rings by Dior Fine Jewelry.

 Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

Tim, in this case, is Tim Burton, the mad goth genius behind Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wednesday’s director and executive producer. Even before the biting teen take on The Addams Family exploded into Emmy nominations and TikTok choreo and tween girls’ birthday party themes, the hallowed filmmaker wanted to talk to Ortega, his show’s then 20-year-old star, about a second season. She dutifully compiled ideas.

A week after that, Ortega arrived at Burton’s California home, the stuff of legend itself: “You walk in and it’s the huge throne from Alice in Wonderland.” Ortega sets the scene. “There’s a jar of eyeballs in the bathroom.” Burton is known to tote figurines, “his little creatures,” she says, in his pocket at all times. They small-talked, though Burton doesn’t really do small talk. A season two of Wednesday, yes, but first something else. “He just pretty much plopped a script in my hand,” Ortega says, “and it was Beetlejuice.”

Technically, it was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the sequel to Burton’s camp-horror 1988 original. Almost 40 years in the making, the film arrives this month and revives Michael Keaton from the undead alongside original cast members Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara, plus a terrifyingly vampy Monica Bellucci (with whom Burton is now in a relationship). An overcome Ortega thanked Burton and drove off, but after only 15 minutes, curiosity killing her, she pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway, stared out over the rocks and sea, and then devoured the script: “Instantly I was like, ‘Oh man, they’ve done a thing here.’ ”

Neither Ortega nor I can share in much detail what thing, exactly, Burton and company have done with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—Warner Bros. permitted me to screen the film in New York after I all but swore on my firstborn child not to reveal any plot or traffic in language even approximating a review. But I think I’m allowed to say that the film vaults Ortega, who plays Ryder’s sullen teen daughter, Astrid Deetz, into the pantheon of her veteran castmates—she’s credited just before Willem Dafoe—and cements her as a mistress of the macabre, poised to become Gen Z’s answer to Ryder. (“I’d never give myself that credit,” Ortega demurs.)

Ortega is “one of my favorite people to work with,” Burton tells me via Zoom from Dublin, where they’re shooting season two of Wednesday. “For me, she’s different from anybody,” Burton says, the Irish Sea lapping in his background, but Ortega gives him glimmers of first encountering Ryder decades ago. “They both, as young people, had a very strong soul,” he says. “They’re like silent movie actors.”

Ryder says she and Ortega forged a “sacred” bond on the London set. Ortega “is so wise and has enormous compassion and an absolutely brilliant mind,” Ryder tells me in an email. “She’s one of the most authentic people I’ve ever known.”

Top by David Koma; floral tie by Jennifer Behr.

Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

Ortega is clearly not precious about comparisons to Wednesday (or Astrid), because she’s dressed all in black: cropped hoodie, combat boots, and nail polish, with several silver rings on her fingers. Her black hair is cut into a lob, necessitating extensions to be meticulously crocheted into Wednesday’s trademark pigtails. She’s toting a black drawstring backpack, with plans to hit the streets. Her coffee, too, is black, and so is her humor.

When a hotel manager pokes her head into the otherwise closed lounge, offering to draw the dense velvet curtains for total privacy, Ortega peers at me and quips, with impeccable timing: “Now you’re trapped.”

That morning, Ortega meditated for 30 minutes in her hotel room. A chronic overthinker, she typically struggles to find moments of zen, but the practice nearly lulled her to sleep, making her “strangely reflective” about the past 18 months.

“WHEN PEOPLE MENTION MY NAME, IT’S ALMOST LIKE MY NAME HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM ME. NOW I JUST FEEL LIKE I’M FLOATING AND… I’M UP FOR INTERPRETATION.”

There was the sudden idolatry that followed the show’s debut in 2022, recentering the Addams Family franchise around its woeful teen daughter; entire families binged it over Thanksgiving weekend and it shattered Netflix records to become the streamer’s most viewed English-language series ever. Ortega earned Golden Globe and SAG nods and an Emmy nomination for best lead actress in a comedy—the second youngest one in history after Patty Duke—plus the ingenue rainmaker status of a Dior Beauty contract. (Free of the pallor of Wednesday’s makeup, I can see Ortega’s smattering of freckles.) But Ortega also courted controversy after she publicly questioned Wednesday’s writers (more on that later). During her dizzying rise, Ortega was alternately celebrated as an all-too-rare Latina success story and critiqued as a somehow-imperfect representative. She is not yet 22 years old.

Top by David Koma; floral tie by Jennifer Behr.

 Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

“A majority of the last year and a half has felt very far from me,” Ortega says from behind the fringe of her trademark curtain bangs. She describes the experience almost like a sci-fi thriller: “very dissociative and alien and out-of-body.” She’s a Halloween costume, for goodness’ sake. “When people mention my name, it’s almost like my name has been taken from me. Now I just feel like I’m floating and…I’m up for interpretation.”

There are actors, and then there are celebrities, cults of personality adept at playing the game—posting pithy captions, forming high-powered girl gangs, dating sexy peers as a means of elevation. Ortega passionately loves acting, but she’s unafraid to say the quiet part out loud: Celebrity is “absolutely ridiculous.”

“I remember feeling really wrong for resisting it,” she says. Working with the likes of Burton is her actorly dream. The bizarro nature of fame is something she signs up for as a result. “I think if anybody were in my shoes and reacted to it in a welcoming manner, there’s something severely wrong with you.”

At Ortega’s VF cover shoot the previous day at a private home in the English countryside, a local girl showed up fully dressed as Wednesday, down to the black braided wig and white makeup. The wee fan stood there in a beautiful English garden, backlit with the glow of sunlight, a huge grin on her face. Ortega found it simultaneously hilarious and endearing. “Who could have anticipated that someone as dark and twisted and sarcastic as Wednesday could bring out such joy?”

Wednesday resonates as a potent antidote to tween and teenage insecurity. And the namesake character is stubbornly, insistently herself, unconcerned with popular cliques and secret society entrées (“I prefer to be vilified,” she intones). Instead Wednesday appoints herself chairwoman of her own Tortured Novelists Department, tapping away on her typewriter in a bid to eclipse Mary Shelley when she isn’t busy cracking the case of a murderous monster at Nevermore Academy, a kind of spooky Andover. Wednesday is Harriet the Spy and Daria and the witches of The Craft for the TikTok generation, but she tickled my 10-year-old daughter, my 68-year-old mother, and me in almost equal measure.

“The intelligence and wit and confidence that Wednesday has, I think a lot of us wish that we possessed in ourselves,” Ortega theorizes. “When you’re trying to create yourself and you’re taking all these bits and pieces from other people’s personalities and creating your own broken mirror…” she pauses. “Sorry, I can’t think right now,” Ortega says, claiming the caffeine has yet to hit. “I think that’s the beauty of Wednesday. She is inspiring because she’s somebody who doesn’t care what anybody else thinks.” Ortega sees plenty of herself in the character—they’re both curious people watchers—but she wishes she could be as self-assured. That and, unlike her alter ego, “I do like a nice hug.”

Clothing by Miu Miu; tights by Falke.

 Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

Playing Wednesday has sparked growing pains in Ortega, who started shooting season one in 2021 at age 18, around the same time her peers went to college. “I find myself constantly reaching back to what once was,” she says, speaking softly and quickly, with an almost academic maturity beyond her 21 years. Mid-meditation in her hotel room, she thought about her purple-painted childhood bedroom in La Quinta, California, nestled in the festival-famous Coachella Valley. “I never had my own room growing up,” she tells me. “And now I get to travel the world.”

The fourth of six children born to Natalie, an ER nurse, and Edward, a former sheriff who works at the California district attorney’s office, Ortega grew up in a close-knit desert community of fellow Mexican families. (Natalie is also of Puerto Rican descent.) Tumbleweeds rolled outside her brother’s football games, “and we would run off into the night with black lights looking for scorpions,” she remembers. “One time, we caught a baby rattlesnake in a Gatorade bottle.” Ortega didn’t realize until later that Coachella—or simply “the festival,” as she calls it—was world-renowned, as if it were normal to watch Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg with your dad in your veritable backyard.

From a young age Ortega thirsted for more. “I’m so appreciative of my six-year-old self who wanted to be a president and an astronaut…because I realize now that I was always looking for a way out.” Around the same time, baby Ortega watched Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning. It may as well be her Casablanca. The 2004 thriller “changed the entire course of my existence,” she says with stone-cold earnestness. Watching nine-year-old Fanning’s precocious performance, Ortega decided she wanted to be an actor. Her parents laughed—then her mom posted a video of her performing a dramatic monologue on Facebook, which a family friend passed on to a casting director. Soon Natalie was driving Ortega six hours round trip to LA for auditions. “I don’t know how she’s still standing,” Ortega effuses.

At first Ortega struggled to land roles as a young Latina in a casting clime seeking white girls. She made her acting debut as a shooting victim on CSI. After 30 episodes as young Jane (Gina Rodriguez) on Jane the Virgin, Ortega got her next break: starring in the Disney Channel sitcom Stuck in the Middle, playing the middle child. She segued as Jennifer Garner’s daughter in the family comedy Yes Day. Ortega tries not to think about shrugging off the mantle of child actor, but “there is a part of me that is very aware that I’m short and I have a baby face and my voice can be high-pitched.”

In real life her siblings sacrificed for her career, as Natalie spent the majority of her time shuttling Ortega to work. “I got home and it was ‘Jenna, you didn’t do the dishes before you left, so you have to do the dishes all week,’ ” she remembers fondly. Her brothers and sisters remain “completely unfazed” by her success. “They could not care less,” Ortega laughs, “which is so sweet.”

Jacket by Miu Miu.

Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

At a too young age, Ortega discovered horror, the genre she’d come to be known for even before Wednesday, with roles in 2022’s Scream reboot, its sequel Scream VI, and the A24 slasher X. Her entry point: the cult classic killer doll B-movie Child’s Play (M3gan for children of the ’80s and beyond). “It fucked me up for years to come,” Ortega nods matter-of-factly. Chucky haunted her nightmares so severely that as a preteen, she forced herself to rewatch Child’s Play as a means of facing her fears. “I still was a massive scaredy cat,” Ortega says, “but I was interested in something that scared me.”

Horror has since become a home to her, and there’s something new that strikes terror in her heart: “doing a comedy.”

As the “new kid,” Ortega came to the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice set prepared to keep to herself—a loner like her character, Astrid, and Ryder’s Lydia before. She didn’t want to encroach on the cast’s long-awaited reunion. They shot exteriors for the sequel at the same white Victorian house on the same hill in East Corinth, Vermont, as the original, with some of the same locals looking on. Ortega wasn’t even born until 14 years after it debuted.

She grew up obsessed with Beetlejuice, even if “the storyline kind of doesn’t make sense,” she opines. (And the founding premise of a grown male demon forcing a teenage girl to marry him doesn’t age particularly well. Honk, honk.) To step into the classic now—the new trailer pans, in slo-mo, to Ryder and O’Hara and then to Ortega, set to a chilling “Day-O” remix—struck her as nothing short of surreal.

WINONA RYDER SAYS SHE AND ORTEGA FORGED A “SACRED” BOND ON THE LONDON SET.

“Every time I walked onto that set, I wanted to remember it for the rest of my life,” Ortega says. She describes one wild church scene with theater-kid vigor. “You have Willem Dafoe in a trench coat, sliding down in a back pew, just watching everyone,” she says, while Ryder stood by with her pointy bangs of yore. Then Keaton materialized.

“I remember feeling my soul leave my body for a second,” Ortega says of her first encounter with the Betelgeuse in his crusty ghoul regalia. “And then in between takes, he’s sitting down and drinking his tea.”

Bodysuit and cuffs by Alaïa; cap by Lynn Paik.

Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

The cast quickly quashed Ortega’s lone wolfing, with O’Hara and Ryder, especially, taking her in. Mother-daughter chemistry came naturally for Ryder and Ortega. “Once we started talking, and I remember it was on our third day together, the day we shot the scene in the attic, we never stopped,” Ryder says. “It almost felt holy, like some sort of blessing from above, which, I think, is because we share the belief that film can be a kind of religious experience.”

“I feel like if you locked Winona and I in a blacked-out room…we could talk for hours, no touching of the phones,” Ortega says. “Just eye contact, in a dream.”

The pair connected less over their shared affinity for dark material (“I’m not even sure that we’d consider it dark,” Ortega counters) but over Tom Waits music and the nihilistic Mike Leigh–directed 1993 black comedy Naked. “It’s very pessimistic,” Ortega notes.

“SHE IS ONE OF THE MOST AUTHENTIC PEOPLE I’VE EVER KNOWN.”

Ryder, now 52, was only 15 when she appeared in Beetlejuice. “I think she naturally is very protective of other women,” Ortega says, and the elder conferred some wisdom and experience on the younger, though Ortega won’t go into specifics. “That kind of trust, the kind I have with her,” Ryder adds, “it’s once-in-a-lifetime rare.”

In the wake of Wednesday, Ortega was grappling with an identity crisis of sorts. “For a long time I was so scared and so thrown off by everything that happened,” she says of her overnight ascent. She had dodged the minefields of child-actor-dom, but growing up a Disney star came with other stumbling blocks—namely, finding a sense of self. “So much of my life has been on set with other people telling you what to wear, what to do, what to say,” Ortega tells me. She mentions it more than once, the lack of control she felt at work at a time when her peers were flexing their independence and testing their limits. “I realized that I had lived pretty much all of my life under this naive perspective that I never challenged or questioned things because I never felt like I needed to.” She likened shooting Wednesday, and the reception that followed, to a door opening. “It was the first time that I felt like I actually had to ask myself what I wanted.”

When Ortega First heard about Wednesday, she had just been shot in the face.

She was filming X in New Zealand in 2021. “I had this gnarly prosthetic with the spaghetti-like tendons peeking out of my cheek,” she explains, plus “fake teeth that were digging into my lip. I couldn’t speak. I had a little saliva cup that I would just tilt my head”—Ortega does so now for emphasis—“and spit.” That’s when a rep dropped the tip about a Netflix show about Wednesday Addams. “They’re looking for a Latina actress,” she recalls in a light, breezy tone. “There’s a possibility they’re interested in you.” She had no time to shower before Zooming with Burton, so the sweat and fake blood from the shoot remained matted in her hair. She drew the shades to drown out the sun. She’s pretty sure Burton laughed. They didn’t small talk back then either, except for bonding over a shared opinion that the director’s native Burbank is a “suburban hell.” Ortega performed a four-page monologue to Thing, the Addamses’ beloved severed hand. The whole affair lasted all of five minutes. (“I didn’t need more than five minutes,” Burton tells me later.)

It’s been reported that Ortega passed more than once on Wednesday, but Ortega tells me a slightly different version. “Initially, I wasn’t married to the job,” she recalls, feeling more excited about film work after coming up on TV. But “the bluntness of the call [with Burton] made me want it more.” She reran her audition alone in her bathroom, recording and analyzing herself. Burton “really got in my head,” she says. Two days later, Ortega got the call.

Top by Balmain.

 Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

“It was probably one of the hardest roles that you could cast,” Burton says, because it required a depth that can’t be faked. “Unless you have that internal life,” a certain clarity and strength, “there’s no way.”

From go, then 18-year-old Ortega wanted to be a producer on the show—a role she tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate for season one. Her creative concerns had flared. “I think it’s natural to be fearful of signing your life away and wanting some sort of agency or wanting confirmation that your voice would be heard,” she says. Ortega speaks softly, but she doesn’t flinch in advocating for herself. “I’m aware of my position as an actor. I know that I’m not in charge…. But I think with someone like Wednesday, who is in every scene, it only makes sense for that person to be that involved in what’s going on behind the scenes because she’s onscreen every second of the project.”

“I DIDN’T NEED MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES” TO CAST HER, SAYS TIM BURTON.

She says she was told that it wasn’t common for actors to produce in the first season of a series but that they could revisit the issue in season two. “And then I think a lot of the work that I ended up doing,” she says, “and a lot of the conversations that I was having were more of a producer’s conversations half the time.”

Ortega felt protective of her character, a fact she made plain when she appeared on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s popular Armchair Expert podcast in March 2023. In what became a notorious interview, Ortega shared that she became “almost unprofessional” at times while filming, changing lines that she felt weren’t authentic to Wednesday. “Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” Ortega said on the show. “Her being in a love triangle made no sense. There was a line about 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 recounted seemingly prickly exchanges with the writers. “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.”

Her comments came at a tender time for Hollywood writers. When the Writers Guild of America declared a strike in the months that followed, they skewered Ortega. “Jenna Ortega better be back from NY for her afternoon shift on the picket line,” tweeted BoJack Horseman scribe Nick Adams. “Rewriting is writing! See you at the line, Jenna,” echoed The Bear’s Karen Joseph Adcock. In LA a House Party writer hoisted a sign that read “Without writers, Jenna Ortega will have nothing to punch up!” Veteran producer Steven DeKnight (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Daredevil) called Ortega’s comments “beyond entitled,” tweeting: “she’s young, so maybe she doesn’t know any better (but she should).” (He later apologized.) Online outlets painted her as petulant and disrespectful. “Is Jenna Ortega the most toxic actress in Hollywood?” one pop culture podcast asked. Another wondered if she was “the new Katherine Heigl.”

“To be fair,” Ortega pauses, thinking back on it. “I think I probably could have been….” Then she hesitates, dangling the longest silence of our interview. “I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that. I think, oftentimes, I’m such a rambler.” She laughs; I disagree. “I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better.”

Top by David Koma; floral tie by Jennifer Behr.

Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

Ortega received a crash course in online celebrity media, the way a few incendiary quotes are plucked from a lengthy interview and circulated feverishly around the internet. “Everything that I said felt so magnified…. It felt almost dystopian to me,” she remembers. “I felt like a caricature of myself.”

The predicament taught her a lesson it takes some women decades longer to learn. “You’re never going to please everybody, and as someone who naturally was a people pleaser, that was really hard for me to understand,” she says. “Some people just may not like you…and that’s entirely fine.” In fact, “I got sick of myself last year,” Ortega says, making me laugh. “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.”

I offer my unsolicited opinion: That even after a social movement urging women to advocate for themselves swept Hollywood, when one such woman isn’t a mere silent set piece, the response from some corners remains, How dare she? And, further, that as a young Latina, Ortega is doubly expected to profess gratitude and luck to be in her position but not seek to gain any material power from it, even when, as she noted, the show hinges on her image.

“I agree with that entirely,” Ortega says. “I feel like we definitely need to practice what we preach a little bit more.” We consider that a young male thespian, going Method and deeply in his feels, would be given more license to ride for the integrity of his character. “Women have to be princesses,” Ortega says. “They have to be elegant and classy and so kind and…then when they’re outspoken, they can’t be tamed and they’re a mess.”

For the second season, Ortega is getting her wish. She serves as a producer on Wednesday, which began filming in Dublin a few weeks before our interview in May. Now Ortega is empowered to give notes, whether about prosthetics or Wednesday’s furiously dramatic cello pieces. “Things like that, I live for,” Ortega beams.

For Burton, Ortega’s frankness is an asset: “She’s very direct. She’s very no-nonsense, and I find that very refreshing and beautiful and artistic.” So sharp, he says, “she could direct it if she wanted to,” adding, “I saw, from day one, she’s very aware. She’s more aware, sometimes, than I am.”

The newly minted producer promises the show’s sophomore season will boast new villains, new supernatural abilities, and an even darker tone. “I think the feel that we’re going for is a little bit more horror-inspired,” Ortega says, citing The Masque of the Red Death, the 1964 film based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story, as an inspiration. “Not to say that suddenly we’re the goriest show of all time,” Ortega qualifies. “I mean, there’s six-year-olds watching.” She teases an example: “We’re doing this thing now where Wednesday just kind of appears. She is a little bit of a jump scare herself.”

Wednesday’s second season also promotes Ortega’s onscreen parents, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia and Luis Guzmán as Gomez, to series regulars, delivering on hints that Morticia and Wednesday will more deeply explore their fraught mother-daughter relationship. “I have so much respect for that woman,” Ortega says of CZJ. “She’s just a good, cool person. She doesn’t overthink anything. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, but she definitely relishes in the drama of things, which, for a character like Morticia, it’s perfect.” Chief among the show’s new cast members: Steve Buscemi (“the most perfect, classic man,” per Ortega), with whom she’ll appear in Klara and the Sun. “I remember I walked into the hair and makeup trailer, and ‘The Man in Me’ was playing by Bob Dylan, and Steve turned around and everything went in slow-motion,” she laughs, with glimmers of The Big Lebowski dancing in her head.

Sweater by Givenchy; rings by Dior Fine Jewelry.

 Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

Noticeably absent from the season two cast list is Percy Hynes White, who starred as Nevermore’s brooding artistic Dylan McKay equivalent, Xavier Thorpe, one third of Wednesday’s onscreen love triangle and the guy who seemed to peer into her tortured soul. In January 2023 a woman on Twitter accused Hynes White of sexually assaulting her while she was intoxicated and alleged he threw parties where he assaulted underage girls after giving them drugs and alcohol. Additional allegations later surfaced via Twitter. Hynes White denied the rumors and claimed a “campaign of misinformation” against him online.

Losing Hynes White has been “a weird redirect, but we’re introducing so many different characters that I think it kind of will get lost,” Ortega says. Wednesday’s “world does feel slightly askew anyway.”

Ortega is not succumbing to fears of a sophomore slump. “There’s definitely the pressure of, ‘Oh, I have to get this right.’ ” As wholly as she inhabited Wednesday, after a two-year hiatus—in part due to the strikes—Ortega found it strange, at first, jumping back in. Once she stepped into the character’s sharply tailored striped Nevermore uniform, however—Ortega leans forward, her fingertips fluttering up the front of her body, like a spell coming over her—she was Wednesday all over again.

Before her fifth birthday, Ortega asked her mom if she could dye her black hair blond so she could look like Cinderella. “I did not understand the problem with that because, to me, that was who was cool and interesting and beautiful and powerful,” she says. As Wednesday, Ortega gives girls of color a heroine who plays deliciously against type—a “moody, deadpan Latina,” as the Los Angeles Times coined her and Aubrey Plaza after the duo’s dryly funny Screen Actors Guild Awards presenting gig, an antidote to the prototypically sassy hypersexual drama queen.

It’s not entirely clear to Ortega why Netflix sought out a Latina actor other than that it had yet to be done. Both Wednesday and Ortega have since been alternately celebrated as shining examples of Latina representation and critiqued as somehow not Latina enough. The character’s heritage is nebulous, mainly communicated through Guzmán’s occasional sprinkling of Spanish, but some online critics deemed Wednesday’s identity undercooked, nothing more than a “meaningless treat.” Ortega, for one, appreciates the subtlety; that Wednesday’s Latinness is “not being shoved down your throat. There’s nothing worse than when they have the side Mexican character who’s carrying the flag on their shoulder,” she says. “We’re so much more than that.”

Dress by Richard Quinn.

 Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

Off-screen too, Ortega reckons with the moving target of representation. She grew up smashing piñatas and making tamales at Christmas with her Mexican American and Puerto Rican family, “but then, oftentimes, you’re just not good enough,” she says. “Because I wasn’t born in a Spanish-speaking country, I know people have a hard time connecting with me.” Ortega doesn’t speak Spanish fluently, nor does her father, but it was her mother’s first language (“I’m so jealous every time I hear my mom speak perfect Spanish”). At the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week last September, a video shows Anya Taylor-Joy, who spent her early years in Buenos Aires, introducing her husband to Ortega and Spanish pop star Rosalía in Spanish and Ortega replying in English. Snark ensued.

It stung to be deemed an imperfect representative of a culture to which Ortega herself wishes she were more connected. “I think there’s a part of me that carries a bit of shame,” she says. “For a second I was almost nervous to speak about my family’s background because…I feel like I was made to feel like it wasn’t…” She stops short before saying “valid” or some variation thereof. Ortega wants to become more “in touch” with her roots, to learn more from her tías who emigrated to the United States, who were told not to speak Spanish as schoolchildren so as not to stand out. “But also, something that I’m learning is…it’s not my job to carry the weight of everybody who’s ever had that experience,” Ortega says firmly. Nor should language or birth country define her identity, especially when assimilation is as Latin an experience as anything.

Wednesday is cited as proof that casting Latinx actors can pay dividends. According to a recent McKinsey & Co. study, the Latinx community turns out in reliably higher numbers than other groups at the movies, especially for horror movies (is it the Catholicism, Ortega and I wonder, the sense of spirituality?) but remains underrepresented on- and off-screen. “It’s something that I feel like has not made it through studios’ heads,” she says. “There needs to be a little more faith in what we bring to the table. Maybe that means all of us banding together a little bit more and creating these projects for ourselves,” she adds, sounding like a future executive producer. Ortega points to Hollywood’s roster of Latin talent, from Pedro Pascal and Plaza to Rachel Zegler and her Scream costar Melissa Barrera. “I would love to be able to craft stories that show how powerful we can be.”

Ortega’s heritage manifests in her political impulses. She maligns the conservative anti-immigrant paradigm as the possibility of a second Trump presidency looms. “It’s so corny, but in terms of the land of the free, home of the brave…Mexican people are considered a risk,” she says. “Even the term ‘alien’ is insane when we’re speaking about human beings.” At a pub in Dublin recently, while her friends were “drunk in the corner,” Ortega struck up a conversation with a bouncer about the country’s political and economic clime.

“Did he know who you were?”

“No,” Ortega whispers gleefully.

Ortega has posted in support of Palestine in what is an increasingly tense moment in Hollywood—Barrera was fired from the seventh installment of the Scream franchise over her posts likening Gaza to a concentration camp. “We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech,” a Scream 7 production company responded in a statement. Ortega refuses to be stifled. “The business that we work in is so touchy-feely,” she says. “Everybody wants to be politically correct, but I feel like, in doing that, we lose a lot of our humanity and integrity, because it lacks honesty.” Ortega’s experiencing a rush of thoughts now. “I wish that we had a better sense of conversation. Imagine if everyone could say what they felt and not be judged for it and, if anything, it sparked some sort of debate, not an argument.”

She cocks her head to one side, as if a thought bubble has appeared. “Am I describing world peace?”

Sweater by Givenchy; rings by Dior Fine Jewelry. Throughout: hair products by Björn Axén; makeup products by Dior Beauty; nail enamel by The GelBottle.

Photograph by Tom Craig; Styled by Nathan Klein.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the splashy first step in Ortega’s next act: movie star. And while Halloween-friendly content made her, Ortega’s choices indicate she’s pushing herself. “Of course I’m fearful of being typecast,” she admits.

She’ll star as the titular robot, or Artificial Friend, in director Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s futuristic sci-fi novel Klara and the Sun. “After reading the book, I felt that Klara was maybe a white robot,” Waititi tells me, but after “I started developing the script, I felt that in order for her to feel more out of place, that I wanted someone of color.” A lunch meeting with Ortega sealed it. As ever, “she brought a lot of ideas to the table,” Waititi recalled, and she had binge-read Ishiguro. “Jenna’s very young,” Waititi says, “but I consider her to be an old soul.”

Ortega calls the dramedy “a complete trust fall in Taika’s arms.” She says they shot five different versions of the movie, with Waititi rewriting the script all along. “He would walk into the trailer and I would be reading the [lines] and he would go, ‘Oh, darling, throw those away.’ ” She “went to work every day feeling sick to my stomach with fear over how this was going to turn out, but that was exciting to me.”

“JENNA’S VERY YOUNG,” SAYS TAIKA WAITITI, WHO CAST HER IN KLARA AND THE SUN, “BUT I CONSIDER HER TO BE AN OLD SOUL.”

Waititi, however, never doubted her. “She would often make me very emotional watching her because it was all very believable. It’s a hard thing to play a robot,” but Ortega made Klara feel viscerally human: “She killed it.”

In A24’s Death of a Unicorn, Ortega’s Ridley and her dad, played by Paul Rudd, crash into the mythical creature en route to Rudd’s company crisis management summit. The dark comedy, an indie that received special permission to continue filming during the SAG-AFTRA strike last summer, “reminds me of a Charlie Kaufman–esque situation, where it’s self-deprecating and it’s based in the real world, but with some unexplainable variables,” she says. “It’s magical and mysterious and…. Why would you not want to do a movie for two hours about unicorns?” Especially with national treasure Rudd: “the most lovable, charismatic, dorky guy. He instantly makes you feel at ease.”

Behind the Scenes With Jenna Ortega

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Earlier this year, Ortega sharply pivoted from teen/family fare with the erotic thriller Miller’s Girl, adopting the role of an 18-year-old high school student circling a sexual relationship with her teacher, played by Martin Freeman. Viewers and critics seized on the three-decade age gap between Ortega and Freeman, 52, expressing discomfort at a fantasy scene in which their characters simulate sex. Freeman has said his performance wasn’t an endorsement of the relationship, and Ortega agrees. “It’s not supposed to be a comfortable movie. It’s supposed to be awful at times,” she tells me now. “Art isn’t always meant to be pleasant or happy, and everyone skips off into the sunset at the end. We all have fucked-up experiences at one point or another.”

Ortega is still contending with the celebrity sphere as her IMDB credits grow. It’s uncharacteristic for an actor her age, but she’s seldom snapped in paparazzi photos. She’s yet to trot out a starry romantic relationship either, though she does understand why famous people date famous people (so few others understand). “I don’t plan on speaking about my love life publicly, because that’s mine,” she says. Ortega sees it as a distraction from her work. “When you know too much about someone’s personal life, then you watch films and you can only see them”—the celebrity version of them. “There’s nothing worse.”

At the moment, Ortega claims she isn’t concealing anything especially glamorous. She spends much of her time either traveling or working. “I live on soundstages, pretty much, so it’s so rare that I’m out seeing the sun.”

Lately, though, Ortega is slowly beginning to accept that her life is forever changed, and that it’s likely to change again, many times. “There’s so much about the pressure that is put on this line of work that I do, that it’s laughable and it’s beautiful and it’s awful,” sometimes all at once, she says. Coffees drained, we emerge from the darkness of Velvet and into the Corinthia’s lobby, in full bloom on the eve of the Chelsea Flower Show. Ortega slings her black bag over her shoulder and heads out into the light.