Jenna Ortega finds comedy in characters who refuse to be pleasant, and gives frightened teenagers something to want beyond survival. We rate her precision; the scripts have not always given her enough to do.
Fi1m perspective
In Wednesday (2022), Jenna Ortega lets a little satisfaction show beneath Wednesday Addams's solemn expression. We laughed at how pleased she seemed with her own disagreeableness, without needing to wink at us. Jay Prychidny's editing gives her comic timing room to work, while Emma Myers as Enid Sinclair and Joy Sunday as Bianca Barclay give her people worth sparring with. The school mystery grows predictable, but the tiny signs that Wednesday enjoys herself keep the performance from becoming a succession of blank looks. We recommend the programme for her, with rather less enthusiasm for the investigation.
Her move from the Disney Channel lead in Stuck in the Middle (2016–2018) to the dramatic lead in The Fallout (2021) is worth remembering. The latter asked her to handle trauma and grief as Vada Cavell. Scream (2022) and X (2022) then made horror a prominent part of her work. Those credits should discourage anyone casting her from treating Wednesday's unsmiling manner as the only thing she can do.
In Scream VI (2023), directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, her Tara Carpenter wants the ordinary pleasures of student life. Ortega makes that modest wish feel worth protecting in a film whose conversations are often tired. Opposite Melissa Barrera as her sister Sam, she is the livelier presence, and their kitchen argument gives both actors something recognisable to play. The scene works because Tara has a reason to be cross that does not depend on the next appearance of a knife. It cannot repair the weak mystery around it.
In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), Tim Burton gives her Astrid, daughter of Winona Ryder's Lydia, and too little time to make the relationship matter. Prychidny cuts briskly between the film's competing plots, where his work on Wednesday had served Ortega better. She plays straight the one part written without jokes, and there is only so much an actor can do when the film keeps leaving her behind. She deserves more of the film's attention than that. For her comic timing, start with Wednesday and be prepared to forgive a few predictable clues.
Biography
Jenna Marie Ortega is an American actress. She was born on 27 September 2002 in Rancho Mirage, California.
Ortega is known for her role as Tara Carpenter in the films Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023), and as Astrid in the film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024). She portrays Wednesday Addams and Goody Addams in the Netflix series Wednesday (2022), on which she is also credited as a producer.
