“I was just gutted”: the movie Jenna Ortega will always regret not starring in
Scream queens are all the rage in Hollywood at the moment as moviegoers delight in the darker side of life, what with Scream back in cinemas, The Bride with Jessie Buckley bloodying screens, Samara Weaving returning for Ready or Not 2 and plenty more gothic, slashy stuff on the way. Atop the pile of actors in recent years, though, has to be Jenna Ortega.
While she’s not involved in the latest Scream movie, number seven that came out this month, Ortega was in the last two and has filled the few years since with all kinds of twisted fare, like the creepy thriller Miller’s Girl with Martin Freeman, dark fantasy horror Death of a Unicorn with Paul Rudd, and a long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel under the stewardship of Tim Burton.
Burton is a director that Ortega has flourished under; possibly not surprisingly, when you learn that he was someone she was desperate to work with ever since she saw his bizarre alien invasion movie, Mars Attacks, from 1996.
Ortega only began her career proper in 2012, but there were soon clues as to the direction she might take when she signed up for the horror sequel Insidious: Chapter 2 a year later, although for the next few years she went the Disney route on a sitcom called Stuck in the Middle. Things started to pick up when she was cast in Netflix’s nail-biter You in 2019 and then The Babysitter: Killer Queen in 2020, which was gory but dreadful.
The following year saw the breakthrough for Ortega, and it was down to Burton, who auditioned her for the Addams Family spin-off, Wednesday, via a Zoom call due to the Covid-19 lockdowns. It proved a masterstroke, and across two seasons the show became the most-watched in Netflix history, attracting stellar cast members and landing Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for Ortega’s performance in the lead role.
In the years since, Ortega has continued to flourish into the queen of all bump-in-the-night stuff, making Ti West’s fantastically grisly X, and signing up for all manner of new projects, including a rumoured remake of the classic thriller Single White Female. But much as Burton was directly responsible for the role that changed everything for her, she still remembers the devastation of missing out on a film that a lot of people don’t even remember he directed, 2019’s reboot of Disney’s Dumbo.
She told GQ: “I remember auditioning for Dumbo. I actually auditioned for Dumbo. I was like fourteen or something like that, and I was so excited. I couldn’t believe that Tim [Burton] was making a movie; it had been a minute. I was like, ah man, this would just be an incredible opportunity. I remember Dumbo being one, that for weeks I was just gutted.”
While it was a considerable money spinner for Disney, the film was not particularly well received by critics, although they appreciated the work of Burton fave Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito on the film. The director, however, did not have a good experience making it, vowing never to work with the company again. Perhaps sensibly, the CGI reboot did away with any talking animals, meaning it didn’t have to address the… questionable crows from the 1941 original, and the script, which was heavily criticised, tried to expand on the storyline to make it more modern.
Ortega, meanwhile, has completed work on a movie that should garner some considerable interest, appearing opposite man of the moment Glen Powell on JJ Abrams’ Ghost Writer (which may still get titled The Great Beyond) about a newlywed couple haunted by a nasty supernatural entity.
