Jenna Ortega says she has entered an experimental phase, even as she spends her days on set with Wednesday in Dublin. The 23-year-old actor, who has played Wednesday Addams since 2022, said the long run of filming has not pushed her deeper into one character so much as made her more intent on finding the next one.
That matters now because Ortega is in the middle of shooting season 3 of Wednesday since February, while also lining up a film that puts her far from the cold stare of Wednesday Addams. In the same stretch of work, she is due to star in Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun and J. J. Abrams’s The Great Beyond, a mix that shows how quickly she is moving between a global television hit and projects that ask for something different.
Ortega put it plainly: “I’ve been in this experimental phase.” She said that shift has become sharper “in the last year or so,” especially as the show “coming to a head” and her career enters “this next chapter.” After trying different kinds of projects, she said, “Now it’s important to me to be focused on stories and characters that I feel truly connected to.”
That evolution is visible in the choices around her. Ortega has balanced mainstream franchises like Scream and Beetlejuice with original thrillers like Miller’s Girl and surrealist tales like Death of a Unicorn. Klara and the Sun pushes the point further: it is based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel and casts Ortega as an “Artificial Friend” robot, a role she described as “very exciting” because it is a naive, hopeful and optimistic character, unlike the ones she has been playing recently.
She also knows why that difference stands out. Ortega said she and Wednesday “mesh pretty well,” and admitted that while she is “in production, going over scripts over and over again” and “there all day, every day, and in every scene,” there are times when she thinks like the character. But she added that Wednesday only “peeks out a bit more, here and there,” which is hardly the same as letting the role define everything else she takes on.
That is the friction in Ortega’s current moment: she remains the face of Wednesday, one of Netflix’s biggest hits, while working hard not to be trapped inside it. Klara and the Sun hits theaters on October 23, giving audiences the next clear test of how far she can carry that broader identity, and season 3 of Wednesday will keep her tied to the franchise that made her a star while she keeps reaching for roles that pull in the opposite direction.
