The Wednesday scripts are in, and star Jenna Ortega is pleased with what she’s seen.
“We’re definitely leaning into a little more horror,” the actress teased when asked about the series’ second season on the 2023 Emmy’s red carpet. “Everything is bigger, it’s a lot more action-packed.”
According to Ortega, who was nominated for her work in the series’ first season (Abbott Elementary creator/star Quinta Brunson won), every episode “feels like a movie” — and though Wednesday’s narrative has evolved, the character “never really changes.”
Ortega, who suggested every episode “feels like a movie,” has seen her career skyrocket since Wednesday premiered in Nov. 2022. In that time, the 21-year-old star also caught flack for publicly disparaging the writing on her series.
“Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” she said of why she felt compelled to inject her thoughts on set. “Her being in a love triangle made no sense. There was a line about like, this dress that she has to wear for a school dance and she said, ‘Oh my God, I love it. Ugh, I can’t believe I said that. I literally hate myself.’ And I had to go, ‘No, there’s no way.’”
Ahead of the series’ second season, Ortega was elevated to a producer, a role that she’s said she’s not only grateful for but has taken seriously. “I was fortunate to be working with someone like [director] Tim Burton, who pulled me in his trailer one day and said that he wanted to be a soundboard for my voice,” she told THR this spring, noting that that hadn’t always been her experience on Hollywood production: “So, every day, me, him, the writers, we’d get together in the morning and go through sides.”
Before returning to the Wednesday set, however, Ortega was off filming the Beetlejuice sequel, another collaboration with Burton and her writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. She also delivered a second Scream film, cementing her star status as a bona fide movie star, before exiting the franchise.