Jenna Ortega may already play the title role in “Wednesday,” but in Season 2, she’ll be taking even more ownership of the project. The 20-year-old star has been elevated to a producing role on the smash hit Netflix series, and during a conversation with Elle Fanning for PvNew‘s Actors on Actors, she revealed some of her biggest priorities for the next installation.
“We’ve decided we want to lean into the horror aspect of the show a little bit more,” Ortega told Fanning. “Because it is so lighthearted, and a show like this with vampires and werewolves and superpowers, you don’t want to take yourself too seriously.”
“We’re ditching any romantic love interest for Wednesday, which is really great,” she added, referring to the Season 1 storyline that saw Wednesday in a love triangle between Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan) and Xavier Thorpe (Percy Hynes White). In the past, Ortega has commented that the plot “made no sense” for her character.
Though Ortega is a first-time TV producer, she says that the move was a “natural progression” from the workplace environment on Season 1.
“We had already been throwing out so many ideas, and I’m somebody who’s very hands on. I want to know what’s going on,” she said. “And with a character like Wednesday, who is so beloved and such a legend, I just really didn’t want to get her wrong. So I try to have as many conversations as possible. On set, with the writers and Tim [Burton], we all would get together and decide, ‘Okay, what works and what doesn’t?’ It was naturally already very collaborative.”
“So in preparation for a second season, we wanted to get ahead of the curve and make sure that we could start the conversations earlier,” she continued. “And I’m just so curious. I want to see the outfits, new characters that are coming in, scripts, and they were gracious enough to let me put the producer hat on.”
In their conversation, Ortega and Fanning discussed how growing up as child actors made it difficult to learn how to assert themselves on set.
“Someone like Wednesday forced me out of my shell in that sense,” Ortega said. “Being a young woman in the industry, sometimes people don’t take you as seriously or as open to the conversations before. I’ve had insane conversations with people in terms of … I just stay in my place, and I don’t know because I’m not this or that, or I’m just an actor. You become a puppet. But the most beautiful experiences that I’ve had on a job, or the jobs that I’m most proud of, have always been the ones where everyone’s voice is heard. Everyone pitches in.”
