The bizarre performance that inspired Jenna Ortega’s love of Tim Burton: “What is this world?
Many people would consider Jenna Ortega to be the Gen Z answer to Winona Ryder, although I’m not sure Ryder would ever pick movie projects as questionable as Miller’s Girl or Death of a Unicorn.
To be fair to Ortega, she has appeared in some great productions so far, and considering that she’s not yet 25, she’s got a whole career ahead of her, and hopefully she’ll avoid anything as bad as that terrible age-gap relationship movie again. All actors make missteps, especially when they’re young, but not many can say that they’ve become the latest muse to a beloved director, but Ortega can.
Tim Burton cast Ryder in various productions near the start of his career, like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, as well as favouring actors like Helena Bonham-Carter (whom he was married to for a time) and, of course, Johnny Depp, all of whom can be considered pretty big muses for Burton, who seems to have approached certain roles with these specific stars in mind. Now, Ortega has joined this illustrious line-up, bagging the leading role of Wednesday Addams in Burton’s Netflix show Wednesday.
Not long after, Ortega was cast in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, getting to play Astrid, the daughter of Ryder’s Lydia Deetz. It was a pretty full circle moment for Ortega, who has loved Burton’s movies since she was a kid. But it wasn’t actually a Burton movie featuring a performance from Ryder that inspired Ortega’s fascination with the director’s distinctive cinematic world, rather Sarah Jessica Parker in Mars Attacks! that did it for the young star.
While Parker will always be best known as the messy, complex yet beloved heroine Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, she also lent herself to some classics over the years, like Footloose and Hocus Pocus. In 1994, a few years before she landed SATC, she made her first collaboration with Burton in Ed Wood alongside Depp, playing his girlfriend, Dolores Fuller.
A few years later, however, Burton would ask Parker to play the strangest role in her career, Nathalie Lake in Mars Attacks! This campy sci-fi comedy saw her sporting a very chic bob, very different to that of her curly mane that defined her role as Carrie Bradshaw. But that chic bob would soon be severed from her body and attached to the body of her pet dog by aliens (don’t you hate it when that happens?), while her dog’s head ended up on her body.
Discussing her fascination with this performance, Ortega told Vogue, “Sarah Jessica Parker on a Chihuahua changed my life. It was the first film I remember seeing and wondering, ‘what is this world?’”
It must’ve been exciting, then, to land a role under the direction of Burton, whose unique approach to crafting these bizarre, often gothic worlds lit a fuse in Ortega’s young mind, subsequently leading her down a path paved with horror projects, and eventually, Wednesday and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
“I think anyone would want to work with Tim Burton and would want to, no matter how strange, help him fulfil his vision,” Parker said in an interview with GQ. It seems like Ortega is of the same opinion.
