Jenna Ortega covers the September issue of Vanity Fair, all to promote Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton’s classic comedy. Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara have returned to their roles, and Jenna was cast perfectly as Winona’s goth daughter. While that’s the film she’s promoting, the bulk of the interview is about Wednesday, the hit Netflix show starring Ortega as Wednesday Addams. She’s filming the second season now in Ireland and it should be out next year… meaning a two-and-half year wait in between seasons? Insane. I enjoyed this interview because I root for Ortega, even if she sometimes says some weird things. She comes across as very sensitive and private. Some highlights:
Her life after ‘Wednesday’ became a monster success: “A majority of the last year and a half has felt very far from me.” She describes the experience almost like a sci-fi thriller: “very dissociative and alien and out-of-body. When people mention my name, it’s almost like my name has been taken from me. Now I just feel like I’m floating and…I’m up for interpretation.”
Her feelings on being a “celebrity”: Celebrity is “absolutely ridiculous. I remember feeling really wrong for resisting it… I think if anybody were in my shoes and reacted to it in a welcoming manner, there’s something severely wrong with you.”
Growing up in La Quinta, California: “I find myself constantly reaching back to what once was… I never had my own room growing up. And now I get to travel the world.”
Stepping foot on the ‘Beetlejuice’ set: “Every time I walked onto that set, I wanted to remember it for the rest of my life. You have Willem Dafoe in a trench coat, sliding down in a back pew, just watching everyone,” she says, while Ryder stood by with her pointy bangs of yore. Then Keaton materialized. “I remember feeling my soul leave my body for a second… And then in between takes, he’s sitting down and drinking his tea.”
At 18 years old, she wanted to be a producer on ‘Wednesday’: “I think it’s natural to be fearful of signing your life away and wanting some sort of agency or wanting confirmation that your voice would be heard. I’m aware of my position as an actor. I know that I’m not in charge…. But I think with someone like Wednesday, who is in every scene, it only makes sense for that person to be that involved in what’s going on behind the scenes because she’s onscreen every second of the project.” She says she was told that it wasn’t common for actors to produce in the first season of a series but that they could revisit the issue in season two. “And then I think a lot of the work that I ended up doing and a lot of the conversations that I was having were more of a producer’s conversations half the time.”
On the major backlash to her claims, last year, that she rewrote ‘Wednesday’ scripts and punched up her dialogue: “To be fair… I think I probably could have been….” Then she hesitates, dangling the longest silence of our interview. “I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that. I think, oftentimes, I’m such a rambler. I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better. Everything that I said felt so magnified…. It felt almost dystopian to me. I felt like a caricature of myself.”
You can’t please everybody: “You’re never going to please everybody, and as someone who naturally was a people pleaser, that was really hard for me to understand. Some people just may not like you…and that’s entirely fine.” In fact, “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.”
The backlash to a young woman standing up for herself: “Women have to be princesses. They have to be elegant and classy and so kind and…then when they’re outspoken, they can’t be tamed and they’re a mess.”
On Wednesday’s Latin heritage: Ortega likes that Wednesday’s Latinness is “not being shoved down your throat. There’s nothing worse than when they have the side Mexican character who’s carrying the flag on their shoulder. We’re so much more than that.”
Her father is Mexican-American & her mother is Puerto Rican: “But then, oftentimes, you’re just not good enough. Because I wasn’t born in a Spanish-speaking country, I know people have a hard time connecting with me.” Ortega doesn’t speak Spanish fluently, nor does her father, but it was her mother’s first language. “I think there’s a part of me that carries a bit of shame. For a second I was almost nervous to speak about my family’s background because…I feel like I was made to feel like it wasn’t…” She stops short before saying “valid” or some variation thereof. “But also, something that I’m learning is…it’s not my job to carry the weight of everybody who’s ever had that experience.”
The thing about asking to be a producer on Wednesday in the first season, when she was only 18 years old, is so bold. It reminds me of an interview I read with Minnie Driver, where she was talking about her awe for the younger actresses standing up for themselves and stepping into a producer’s role really early in their careers. Minnie was like – my generation never did that and we should have, and it’s badass that the girls are doing it now. Anyway, Jenna is now a producer on Wednesday, as of Season 2. As for the Latin heritage stuff… I didn’t know that she doesn’t speak Spanish. If it wasn’t spoken at home, then yeah, she wouldn’t have picked it up. And I like that she represents the diversity of Latina experiences. Not every Latin actress has to play a trope or stereotype. There are goth Latinas. There are nerd Latinas. There are Latinas who don’t speak Spanish.
Cover & IG courtesy of Vanity Fair.
One reason why some people in the Hispanic community feel strongly about Jenna not speaking Spanish is the stigma OF speaking Spanish. This country is deeply racist and seeks to divide, it’s a way of dividing within the community. I think she shows young women (and older women) that they can advocate for themselves. That is reminder that we consistently need.
When I was younger my parents switched to English in the home because they really wanted the children to assimilate. Now they regret it because none of speak our parent’s native language very well. I understand her feeling and how people feel about her. Learning another language isn’t easy for everyone, even know I struggle to find enough time to dedicate with how busy our lives are.
And I also agree with her she should be a producer. She is in every scene. She makes the series work and she clearly understands what her audience wants to see.
I don’t get why people who don’t have a common last name from the UK are expected to speak a second language. My married name is Greek and the first question people ask when they meet is if I can speak Greek. It’s so rude,
Reason number 1 why I changed my surname to a non-Italian one…
The first thing i saw her in was the 2nd season of You- the insane stalker show, which i love.
She was BRILLIANT playing a precocious, neglected teen.
And she didn’t get killed, so i would love to see her pop up in the last season- but she seems BUSY.
Can’t wait to see the Beetlejuice sequel.
She’s a third, even a 4th generation Latino.
It’s 1 maternal great-grandmother who was an undocumented migrant from Mexico and then a maternal grandfather who came from Puerto Rico. Her dad was also born in the USA.
Sadly, in their assimilation, they didn’t hold onto the Spanish language to transmit it.
I’m 3rd generation argentinian and I only speak spanish (I was sent to an English school so I speak English too)
I don’t speak any of my great-grandparents’ languages because they learnt spanish the moment they set foot in the Port of Buenos Aires and their children were born in a Spanish speaking country. If they hadn’t learnt it they might have only married within their communities and I wouldn’t be here LOL.
Jenna can identify as Latina for all I care. At least for me it comes down to representing your family’s culture and traditions, which is why I’m so sick of the stereotypes we get pigeonholed into when we, as a region, are very diverse from each other.
Growing up, my best friend’s parents were of the generation that literally got hit by teachers for speaking Spanish in school. So despite them speaking Spanish basically all the time, they never encouraged their daughter to learn apart from understanding mostly household speech. I don’t think I ever heard her speak it. It was always hard for her because people saw her and her last name and assumed she spoke Spanish and get irritated/shocked that she didn’t. It’s more complicated than a lot of people know.
My mom was hit by the nuns in Catholic school when she was grammar school age. She spoke flawless English even though Spanish was her first language and she made sure that my sister and I spoke English. We are like Ortega and speak almost no Spanish, but we identify as Mexican American. I learns to speak better Spanish in school, which ironically saw the language as important enough to teach.
@Chirstina, same here. English is what we spoke about, and my mother’s side they are from Puerto Rico.
Colonialists always love to beat the language out of you which is why I was enraged when Hilary Baldwin was outed as a fake spaniard and cosplayer.
It’s hard to connect to your cultural community when you aren’t fluent in the language. I’m 3rd generation Canadian with a Ukrainian background, and ever since my grandparents died, my fluency in Ukrainian has faded a lot. My mother spoke mostly Ukrainian to me and my sister growing up (both my parents were born in Canada and speak English perfectly), but just found it more convenient to use English after a while, especially once her parents were both gone. I try to speak and text Ukrainian to her but she just instinctively responds in English and says it’s “weird” when I speak to her in Ukrainian. As I’ve gotten older, and especially given what’s been happening in Ukraine over the past 2 1/2 years, I’ve wanted to reconnect with my community, but I just don’t fit in anymore.
I’m a 3rd generation Argentinian of ukranian heritage. My great-grandparents fled Russian controlled Ukraine in the 1890’s and never looked back. Their language died with them, too.
I don’t fit in either even though my great-great grandparents and great-grandparents left family in Ukraine and sometimes I ponder how cyclical life is in the sense that you and I are being spared while others related to our great-grandparents are suffering at the hands of the russians, again.
Learning and maintaining languages requires time and effort, but especially consistency.
In the past many immigrant families avoided their native language to assimilate faster, but in today’s globalised world this is not needed anymore and doesn’t really make sense.
First, you teach better your native language, not one where you might make mistakes or have less vocabulary.
Second, language knowledge is passive when not practised – you need to read, listen to but especially speak to master a language.
Third, you can only understand a culture when you learn their language, which is their way of seeing and expressing reality.
Fourth, being bilingual has many neurological advantages well documented by science, as your brain becomes more flexible.
Nowadays the recommendation is to link a language to a person or a setting. For instance, Jenna could have learned the language if her mom had been consistently speaking it to her (even if she spoke English with her husband), or if Spanish has been the language at home (if the father speaks it, which he might not do well).
In the States these situations might not be as common as in many European cities, where the norm now is to be multicultural.
In my case, I’m Spanish living in Germany. I only spoke Spanish to my son but he learned German in kindergarten. I insisted on him replying to me in Spanish when he would switched to German because it was easier. He goes to a bilingual school where he learned English, but he also goes to external Spanish lessons to learn the grammar. Now he’s also starting French at school, but he masters the other three languages already and he’s just a tween.
I know many cases like his, but it requires determination to keep the mother language.