Jenna Ortega revisits her "dystopian" Wednesday rewriting controversy

Jenna Ortega is taking some time to address her ill-received comments about feeling the need to rewrite her Wednesday scripts last year. While money-hungry studios were the obvious big bads of last spring’s writers strike, the movement also found an unlikely scapegoat in the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice actor, after she spoke about “putting [her] foot down” on the set of her Netflix show during an interview for Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.

“There were times on that set where I almost became unprofessional in a sense, where I just started changing lines,” Ortega infamously recalled about portraying the character she says she “grew very very protective of.” “The script supervisor thought that I was like going with something and then I would have to sit down with the writers and they would be like ‘Wait, what happened to this scene?’ And I would have to go through and explain why I couldn’t do certain things,” she explained. “Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all.”

Now, one year wiser and with a well-earned season two producer credit of her own, Ortega is admitting to Vanity Fair that she “probably could have used my words better in describing all of that.” A lot of the off-camera conversations, she explained, hinged on her belief that “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’m aware of my position as an actor. I know that I’m not in charge,” she added, but did note that she “think[s] 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.”

Other young actresses in her position like Sydney Sweeney and fellow Netflix star Joey King have fought for production credits and been celebrated for it, so it’s not surprising that Ortega feels that “had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better.” Instead, “everything that I said felt so magnified…. It felt almost dystopian to me,” she remembers, adding that she “felt like a caricature of myself” when everything went down.

But while she does allow that “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,” the whole experience did teach her an important lesson for her future in the industry. “Women have to be princesses,” she said. “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.” Even though the actor “naturally was a people pleaser,” she’s now confident that “some people just may not like you… and that’s entirely fine.”