The movie that changed Jenna Ortega’s life: “What is this world?”
Similar to other popular directors like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, Tim Burton is a filmmaker who tends to work with a regular group of collaborators, including Johnny Depp, Michael Keaton, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito, and the late Alan Rickman and Christopher Lee, and although getting to be part of this exclusive club is a rare honour, it’s one that Jenna Ortega has been included in.
Between Wednesday and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Ortega has become Burton’s leading lady of choice for a new generation, but her connection with the Edward Scissorhands director goes beyond their first project together.
She had massive expectations on her shoulders when she was cast in Wednesday, a live-action reboot of the iconic The Addams Family franchise on Netflix, but the series drew positive reviews and became one of the biggest hits in the history of the streaming service, turning Ortega into one of the definitive stars of her time. It led to another collaboration with Burton when he cast her in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as Astrid Deetz, the daughter of Winona Ryder’s character, Lydia, from the first film.
Although the success certainly transformed her career, it also offered Burton the chance to stage a comeback. While he made a series of undeniable masterpieces during the earliest stage of his career, the director had dealt with a lot of misfires in recent years, including Dark Shadows, Big Eyes, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, and Dumbo, so it’s no coincidence that the two projects he’s made with Ortega seemed to remind the world as to why he is such a genius filmmaker of the gothic nature.
Her positive effect on Burton’s trajectory is part of her longstanding affection for the filmmaker, who she told Vogue was responsible for getting her interested in cinema, revealing that one of the most inspirational moments of her life as a young cinephile was getting to see his absurdist science fiction satire Mars Attacks! for the first time.
“Sarah Jessica Parker on a chihuahua changed my life,” Ortega said, “It was the first film I remember seeing and wondering, ‘what is this world?’”
Although many of his fans would cite Ed Wood or Batman Returns as his best film, Mars Attacks! has steadily been getting more critical reappreciation over the years. The film flopped at the time of release, as audiences weren’t quite expecting to see an alien invasion film that depicted mankind and the United States government as being completely incompetent, and it also didn’t help that the film debuted in December 1996, which was only six months after Independence Day became the biggest film of the year by showing a more inspirational, uplifting story of the human race fending off invaders from space.
Mars Attacks! has been reclaimed as a far more clever, biting indictment of militarism and human clout than it was given credit for at the time, so it’s not surprising that it had a strong effect on a self-proclaimed cinephile like Ortega. While she has occasionally come under fire for some of the roles she’s accepted, the actor has certainly signed up for films that have a similarly acidic sense of dark humour as Mars Attacks!, with the likes of Death of a Unicorn, X, and the most recent Scream sequels.
