The movie Jenna Ortega knew everyone would hate: “It’s supposed to be awful”
The phrase ‘seemed to come from nowhere’ might be an overused one, but it can probably be applied to Jenna Ortega, an actor who has had a five-year ascendency that outshines pretty much anyone else in the industry.
Although she did plenty of child acting, including a stint on the Disney Channel, it was once she started to transition to grown-up and notably darker roles that she started to really get attention, on Netflix’s psychological thriller You and horror The Babysitter: Killer Queen in 2020. But she really stood out the following year in the school shooting drama The Fallout, winning acclaim thanks to her performance as a traumatised student survivor.
2022 brought more success for Ortega on two, similarly slashy fronts, first with Scream, the fifth movie in the franchise and then with the brilliant retro-gorefest X, directed by Ti West, the first in the trilogy that became something of a Mia Goth showcase, but that also illustrated what a talent Ortega was going to become.
Thanks to two more ‘people get randomly offed’ movies in the same year, the Foo Fighters’ nonsense Studio 666 and comedy American Carnage, Ortega by this point was already being referred to as the It-girl of horror, and she soon leaned into the gothic aspect of it all by signing on to the Netflix Addams Family spin-off Wednesday as the lead character.
The success of that was fairly spectacular: Wednesday remains the most-watched Netflix show in history, with an ensemble cast of acting legends and Tim Burton directing four out of the first season’s eight episodes. It was a lavish production full of engrossing characters, and season two, when it arrived last year, proved just as popular.
Ortega, for her part, picked up Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for her performance in the show, and it might have been more than understandable had she just taken the safe route with her next career move. But leaning into her love of doing the unexpected, she instead plumped for a role in a film that was likely to do anything but be a box office smash, 2024’s Miller’s Girl.
Co-starring The Office and Sherlock’s Martin Freeman, it told the tale of a college student and her creative writing professor getting way too close for comfort and immediately proved controversial due to the 34-year age gap between the characters, with some scenes appearing online and gathering all kinds of dismayed reactions.
Ortega was distinctly unbothered by it all, however, telling Vanity Fair: “It’s not supposed to be a comfortable movie. It’s supposed to be awful at times. 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.”
As imagined by most, the film wasn’t a huge success on release, although it made a small profit. Reviews from critics were mixed, and Freeman had to come out and say that the film was in no way an endorsement of the relationship portrayed at its core.
Not that it hurt Ortega’s career in any way at all, she swiftly moved on to the much-awaited Beetlejuice sequel later the same year and has several even more prominent projects on the way, including a Taika Waititi-directed sci-fi Klara and the Sun, and JJ Abrams’ own big-budget sci-fi movie The Great Beyond, which will arrive in cinemas in November.
