It’s a rare sunny day where Jenna Ortega is. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and a gentle wind rustles the leafy branches over her head. The world is quiet. Peaceful. Wednesday Addams would despise it, but Ortega is basking in it.
The twenty-three-year-old Wednesday star is sitting in that warm summer light after a long day of shooting season 3 of the macabre Netflix juggernaut. Right now, over Zoom, she looks like Wednesday even away from the set, wrapped in a coal-colored sweater with her naturally dark-brown hair dyed even darker. She’s been working in Dublin on the new episodes since February, enduring disagreeable Irish weather. On this day in late June, however, the sun rules supreme, so Ortega uses the opportunity to put a little space between her and her grim alter ego.
People often ask Ortega if she shares much in common with Wednesday, the brilliant but dark-hearted daughter of the Addams family she began playing on the show in 2022. The answer: sometimes. “We mesh pretty well,” Ortega tells me. “But while I’m in production, going over scripts over and over again, and I’m there all day, every day, and in every scene . . . yeah, there’s times where I think like her. Maybe she peeks out a bit more, here and there.”
There’s probably a fair amount of Wednesday inside all of us, which is one reason the series has become such an immense global phenomenon, vaulting Ortega onto the A-list of actors from her generation. She has balanced big-budget mainstream franchises like Scream and Beetlejuice with original thrillers like Miller’s Girl and offbeat surrealist tales like Death of a Unicorn. On the horizon are the title role in Taika Waititi’s robo-girl drama Klara and the Sun and J. J. Abrams’s sci-fi fantasy film The Great Beyond.
Cape by Ann Demuelemeester; boa by Blumarine; earrings by Paspaley.
This article appeared in the September 2026 issue of Esquire
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“I’ve been in this experimental phase,” she says. “It’s only been in the last year or so—especially with the show coming to a head and getting ready to enter this next chapter in my life and career—that I’ve really honed in. I’ve seen some things now. I’ve tried some things. Now it’s important to me to be focused on stories and characters that I feel truly connected to.”
When not inhabiting the Wednesday abyss as she shoots new episodes, Ortega has tried to use her status to take optimistic gambles. She’s gotten a taste of runaway success, learned that not every experiment is a winner, and yet continues to take risks—even if she’s still figuring out which shots are worth taking.
One of those risks is Klara and the Sun, based on the best-selling novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, in which Ortega stars as an “Artificial Friend” robot who explores the world with the wide eyes and open heart of a newborn. It hits theaters October 23 and plays with existentialist ideas about how to have depth but still be happy. “It was very exciting for me to play this naive, hopeful, optimistic character who’s very different than the characters that I’ve been playing recently,” she says in an obvious nod to the cynical, skeptical Wednesday.
Ortega has a lot in common with Klara too, right down to both of them having a penchant for recharging in the sunlight. “One of my favorite things about the book and what makes Klara so special is because she’s written as a back-of-the-store robot. She’s an old model,” Ortega explains. “She’s not a standout Artificial Friend. Or so you think.”
Dress, Givenchy by Sarah Burton. Necklace by Renato Cipullo.
That’s another thing she hopes will be relatable to people everywhere: Who hasn’t questioned whether they matter or felt left behind? Ortega certainly grappled with these doubts, especially during the time she spent as a child actor, playing bit parts before landing regular appearances on TV shows like Jane the Virgin, Stuck in the Middle, and the thriller You.
Now she has the power to chart her own way. Ortega has become a touchstone for her generation, a fact that still takes her aback given how long and difficult the road to success was. “That was a big learning lesson for me, because I started so young and it wasn’t easy coming up,” she says. “I was told many mixed things, and then suddenly I was catapulted into this weird liminal space that, hey, well, maybe things are a bit different for me now.”
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a blockbuster, made with her Wednesday director and Gothic soulmate Tim Burton, and her two Scream movies rejuvenated that self-aware slasher franchise. But not every project has been a home run. Hurry Up Tomorrow, the 2025 drama she made with the Weeknd as a companion piece to his sixth studio album, underwhelmed viewers and is largely known as a meme that pokes fun at the musician’s somewhat stiff acting.
Ortega doesn’t pinpoint any specific regrets, but she acknowledges that she’s learned some lessons the hard way. “One hundred percent, yeah. I don’t know if I can ever categorize anything as a mistake,” she says. “Good or bad, you’re going to learn from it.”
Like most people at her point in life, Ortega says she’s figuring things out. “I’ve gotten such a better understanding of who I am as a person and what I want from the world,” she says. “I wouldn’t have been able to get that understanding of my position had I not gone through phases of trial and error.”
Dress by Meruert Tolegen. Shirt by Marc Jacobs. Ring by Renato Cipullo.
Ortega’s new perspective fueled her work with J. J. Abrams, who brought her aboard his highly secretive new directing project, The Great Beyond, out in October 2027. According to a line from footage teased at CinemaCon last spring, the fantasy film, which costars Glen Powell, Emma Mackey, and Samuel L. Jackson, is about “another world out of sight and sound.”
What Ortega loved was that Abrams was harnessing his own decades of status to create an original, high-concept story—having already delved so deeply into franchise territory with the Star Wars and Star Trek movies. “He’s very intentional with everything,” Ortega says. “The character that I play is a lost young person in a new city. [She has] a confusing history and finds a friend in Glen Powell’s character . . . and that’s pretty much all I could say!”
Ortega can’t help but reveal one more detail: “She’s very knowledgeable about one thing. This is her obsession. She’s quite manic the way that she loves this thing, and it takes over her whole personality. So it was nice for me to play somebody who’s just obsessed with something like that. A freak in a different way.”
Jacket and dress by Dior. Sandals by Jeffrey Campbell.
Acting became Ortega’s own obsession early on. Before her age had hit double digits, she knew she wanted to be a performer. Jenna was the fourth of six children. Her mother, Natalie, was an emergency-room nurse, while her father, Edward, was a sheriff’s deputy. With so many kids to manage and demanding jobs of their own, her parents had to invest in her dream as much as she did.
Ortega says they were unwaveringly supportive, taking her repeatedly on the 130-mile drive from their home in Coachella Valley, out in the central desert of California, to auditions in Los Angeles. She landed her first movie role—a bit part as the vice president’s disabled daughter in Iron Man 3—at age nine.
She shared the scene with a giant teddy bear and the late actor Miguel Ferrer, playing her double-crossing politician father. The character is missing her right foot, so she tucked it up under her dress. “I had sat on my leg all day at work, and I limped all the way to the car with smiles and tears running down my face. I was just so happy to have been on a movie set. I refused to leave the wheelchair, because if somebody needed me, I wanted to be ready.”
Ortega had turned ten by the time the movie came out in May 2013, and even though her spoken lines were cut, her mere appearance in such a massive Hollywood tentpole became a community celebration at her local multiplex in Rancho Mirage, California. Her whole family turned out, along with a handful of her school friends and some of her mom’s emergency-room colleagues. Since Iron Man 3 was playing on multiple screens with staggered start times, they’d watch the movie until she appeared about halfway through, then leave to see her big moment again.
Cape by Ann Demuelemeester. Shorts and boa by Blumarine. Sandals by Gianvito Rossi. Earrings by Paspaley.
“We were hopping from theater to theater to watch the same part of the movie,” she says. “It was really sweet. My friends and family would run in and stand on the side of the theater and then everyone would cheer and scream and we’d go, Ahhhhh! Then we would run over to the next one and do the same thing—repeatedly.”
She remembers how surreal it felt, seeing herself twenty feet tall. But that wasn’t the weirdest part. “I actually don’t even think I was looking at the screen,” she says. “I was looking at the audience. I just thought, Ooh, this is bizarre. These people have seen my face now. It felt like a breaking of the fourth wall.” She laughs, shaking her head. “I was quite existential at the time.”
This moment also made her realize what she loved most about acting. The best part wasn’t being on set, although she loved that too. The satisfaction came in seeing everyone else’s reaction. She says it made her realize how much others had sacrificed to put her on that screen.
“The thrill wasn’t for me. It was the fact I had begged my mom to let me do this thing,” she says. “To see my family get excited about something that I was able to accomplish, because I was stubborn and persistent enough to have made them proud, that was what was exciting to me.”
That memory seems very pure, but things get complicated when you vault into fame. People mine your life for controversy, and creative misfires can feel more damaging than struggling to succeed. She’s trying to fuse the joy with the risk-taking, forever recalculating.
Cape by Ann Demuelemeester. Boa by Blumarine.
That’s still what she loves about this work: when it connects with others. The satisfying thing about Wednesday is the way her character has resonated with millions of people around the world, across cultures, and among people of all ages. Wednesday Addams feels a “brutal inner turmoil of angst and upset and confusion at the world,” Ortega says. Who can’t relate to that?
But there’s also something comforting about her confidence. “Wednesday is very aware of who she is, the world that she lives in, and what she wants out of it,” Ortega says. “Anytime anyone is just undeniably themselves, it’s quite magnetic.”
Although people often assume she and Wednesday are very similar, she says that the person who’s actually closest to the character is Tim Burton himself. “Tim talked about it all the time,” she says. “He was like, ‘Well, she’s kind of . . . me.’ He’s much more shy than her. She’s much more obvious about the way that she feels.”
Now that the show is three seasons along and she and Burton have made a movie together, she sees the two of them—the filmmaker and Wednesday herself—more clearly than ever. “I got a better understanding of Tim and who he was and what he found funny and charming and interesting through the character,” Ortega says. “The more I learned about him, the more I realized what Wednesday represented. Or what she could be.”
Wednesday will soon be wondering that herself. Season 3 of the show isn’t expected to debut until later in 2027, but Ortega says things are less certain for the character this time around. She’s questioning everything. Even more than usual.
“This season, especially because the kids are seniors in high school now, we’re dealing with more confrontational feelings regarding family and what it means to be an adult and what you see for your life,” she says. “It’s not really until you get to the precipice of adulthood that you start to realize, Oh, God, well, maybe I’ve got to have a plan.”
Ortega knows that feeling. Or did. “Not that that ever really goes away,” she says. There may be sunny days ahead, but shadows always have a way of creeping in.
As seen in the opening image: Jacket and dress by Dior. Earrings and ring by
Sauer.
Jenna Ortega is wearing Dior Makeup and Rouge Dior On Stage Matte Lipstick throughout.
Photographed by Chantal Anderson
Styled by Alfonso Fernandez Navas
Hair by Cesar Ramirez using Conde Professional Hair Extensions
Makeup by Melanie Inglessis at Forward Artists
Manicure by Thuy Nguyen at A-Frame using Dazzle Dry
Tailoring by Elena Korbukh Production by Hyperion
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