In a new profile in Vanity Fair, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice star Jenna Ortega is expressing some regrets over comments she made regarding her hit Netflix show Wednesday.
As reported in 2023, Ortega drew fire from writers — particularly during the extended Hollywood strikes — when she told Dax Shepard and Monica Padman‘s Armchair Expert podcast she had to “put [her] foot down” regarding scripts for the show.
“There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines,” she said in part. “I had to sit down with the writers, and they’d be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ And I’d have to go and explain why I couldn’t go do certain things.”
The words “toxic” and “entitled” were bandied about in tweets and headlines after her comments made the news.
To VF, Jenna looked back, saying, “I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that,” calling herself “a rambler.”
She added, “I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better.”
She added of the flap, “Everything that I said felt so magnified. … It felt almost dystopian to me. I felt like a caricature of myself.”
Jenna confessed, “I got sick of myself last year. My face was everywhere … so 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.”
Ortega reveals she successfully lobbied for a producer credit on the second season of Wednesday, which debuts on Netflix in 2025, in an effort to secure more “agency” for herself and her character, Wednesday Addams.
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