Jenna is featured on the March 12th issue of The Sunday Times Style! You can read her interview below! I’ve added scans from the issue and photoshoot to the gallery!

THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE – Holy shit!” yells Jenna Ortega, the Disney Channel child star better known these days as Netflix’s incarnation of the adorably creepy style-and-attitude icon Wednesday Addams, straight into my face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” She’s perhaps seven and a half minutes late to our Zoom call — I have waited far longer for celebrities — but she’s mid regret-laden meltdown regardless. Ortega is zooming from the driver’s seat of her car, parked outside her LA apartment, wearing a hoodie, no make-up, hair tied back in a ponytail, with her fringe, sorry, bangs, swooshing about in heightened emotional disarray. “That is, like, the worst! I was trying to do it on my computer — I can’t do it inside my house because there are workers, they just knocked down a wall. I was like, ‘OK! I’m going to do it in my car!’ But the wi-fi’s never been so shit. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m … ”

Breathe, I interrupt.

We inhale and exhale extravagantly, together.

“Ah. That’s it. We took the breath. Now I feel good.”

As anxiety-provoking as all of this is to Ortega, it’s rather great for me. Honestly: I’d thought she would be a bit dull. Though I adore Ortega’s Wednesday — that wonderful, funny, cool, chic little oddball — I’d assumed the actress who plays her must be not nearly so fun. My past experience of very young celebs (Ortega is just 20) who have been performing for much of their brief lives — Ortega got an agent at eight after her mother posted a video of her reading a monologue on Facebook, started acting professionally at nine, scored the lead on the Disney Channel’s Stuck in the Middle aged 13, got famous, dialled it down a bit with some smaller roles in bigger movies until Tim Burton and Netflix’s Wednesday came calling, and now she’s an international superstar — is that they haven’t got a lot to say for themselves. All hints of authenticity, of odd sweetness, sweet oddness, tend to get buried beneath media training. They’re so ferociously briefed by handlers, terrified they’ll say a vaguely controversial thing, they trot out the same anodyne, interchangeable platitudes, coated in a layer of brittle charm that doesn’t hide how jaded they already are, so you start doing the mental arithmetic on how long until they burn out, break down, career off the rails …

In Ortega’s case, though, it would seem I’m wrong. She has flashed more personality across my laptop screen in the course of a minute than some celebs twice her age have in an entire interview hour; if she’s not Wednesday Addams exactly, then real-life, unscripted Ortega seems to pack an equivalent personality punch — and bonus points for the swearing. Hooray for having all your daft prejudices overturned in the time it takes one woman to say, “Holy shit.”

We’re here to discuss Scream VI, the latest venture for the horror franchise that started in the Nineties with Wes Craven as director, in which Ortega reprises the role of Tara. I haven’t watched it or its predecessor because I can’t watch horror. Am I pathetic, I ask her.

“No. That does not equate.”

Can she watch horror?

“Now I can. Now I love horror films. I used to be a huge scaredy-cat. Then I became a teenager. And I’ve always been very interested in gore. I don’t know why, it’s just this thing I can’t turn away from.”

Is that why she keeps getting cast in horror, I ask. As well as the Screams, and Wednesday (which, though rated 12, has an undeniable horror component), she has appeared in Insidious: Chapter 2, The Babysitter: Killer Queen, American Carnage and season two of Netflix’s slick millennial serial-killer series You. More than one critic has called Ortega a modern scream queen.

“For some reason people see my face and want to throw blood on it … I don’t know what it is. I’ve had a horror director tell me once my eyes looked like they could be very innocent. It was never intentional, but it’s really fun.”

It looks messy.

“Oh, so messy! I remember, shooting the last [Scream], waking up at four in the morning, hopping in a hot shower, blow-drying my hair, ready for set … and then falling to the floor, remembering in one hour I’m going to be covered in blood and dirt and sweat and guts. You’re never clean. And very sticky. At the end of the day, when you’re peeling your clothes off, it does that thing where your skin is attached [to the fake blood and prosthetic wound gore], so your skin is kind of raised up from your body as it slooooooowly separates itself. You’re going to lose a few arm hairs.”

So you don’t need to wax?

“No, so that’s a benefit.”

There may be no gore in Wednesday, but it’s her deadpan stoicism in the face of mortal danger, supernatural horror and vicious schoolgirl status games that is much of the reason she is so adored — and by so many. Wednesday is a breakout success for Netflix; it debuted at No 1 on its release in 83 countries, became the second most watched English-language show in the platform’s history, surpassed Stranger Things’s record for the most amount of streamer hours in its first week — and elevated Ortega to an entirely new level of fame.

I ask her if she wanted the role desperately, from the first moment she heard about it.

“No, I didn’t. I got the email, passed on it.” Really? Why? “I had done so much TV in my life, all I’ve ever wanted to do is film. When I first started acting, I don’t want to say nobody believed in me, but at the same time nobody believed in me. You have to prove yourself. It’s only in the last three or four years that I’ve been able to start going up for film. I was scared that by signing on to another television show it could prevent me from doing other jobs I really wanted and cared about. The only reason I went back is because Tim [Burton, director and executive producer of Wednesday] is such a legend, and we just happened to get along very well. But even then I said, ‘Ah, no — I think I’m OK,’ a couple [more] times.”

I tell her how much I enjoyed it, how much everyone I know enjoyed it, and Ortega seems grateful, if shellshocked by the vastness of Wednesday’s reception.

“I didn’t expect the reaction. The [Wednesday] cast and I, I remember, we used to talk about it in Romania [where the show was filmed], we were like, ‘Hey, what do you think will happen with the show?’ That was it, that was the most we ever really got into it. So I thought it wasn’t going to be watched. That it will be a nice little gem that someone finds, but … ”

Most people don’t?

“Yeah.”

Would that be preferable?

“Yeah,” Ortega says carefully, like someone who doesn’t want to seem ungrateful but feels compelled to be truthful nonetheless. “I used to do a Disney show when I was younger. I was a little bit of a public figure, used to get recognised, or whatever. When I look back, I think I was so out of place. I didn’t understand where I was … and you start to see Hollywood for the first time, and it’s a bit intimidating, a bit off-putting … I felt like I was a people’s princess. I didn’t really feel like myself. Then it started to slow down and I lived a pretty normal life … ” She tails off. Until Wednesday, until now, I think.

Ortega is a perfectionist, she tells me, constantly “mentally tweaking and adjusting and fixing things in my head: what I should have done, what could have been better”. I’m guessing she can’t watch herself on screen? “No! Some actors watch their work like game-day footage, like they’re athletes. I completely understand, but I really can’t. If I have to go to a screening of something I did, which is very rare, a lot of the times I’ll say, ‘Mmmm, no,’ but if I do I try to go to the bathroom as many times as possible, or I’ll randomly take a phone call, like, I have to get out.”

I am presuming, therefore, that she hasn’t watched back her famous, pivotal dance scene in Wednesday, the beautiful, crazy, episode four sequence that has become a TikTok sensation, with teenagers the world over doing their own versions of it. “No. When they were telling me [it was going viral] I was trying to seem uplifted about it, like, ‘Oh, wow!’ But mentally, in my head, I was hoping people wouldn’t pay so much attention to that part. It’s disorientating. I don’t think people are naturally designed to have that many eyes on them.”

Nor do I, I tell her, thinking how far away the actual experience of fame is from the fantasy sold by primetime TV talent show impresarios.

She tells me she needs to find balance, time for her friends, a life that isn’t all work. I tell her I’m worried about her; she laughs and says: “To specify, I’m not completely alone, I do have my core people I’ve known since I was four or five years old, and they’re beautiful and wonderful and amazing. I’m totally good.”

Any love life?

“No. Love life — I truly don’t even really consider. Love life … It’s a really weird job for that, and honestly it’s never been … I don’t know. I’m definitely more of a work person. I mean, some people figure it out, but I’m not really in a place where … I don’t know. It doesn’t really have anything to do with my work.”

But you’re single?

“Yeah.”

Got your eye on anyone?

“If something like that happens, it happens, but I’m not going to seek it out. I do appreciate my solitude. I need it.”

And because this is a gloriously Wednesday Addamsish point on which to leave Jenna Ortega, scream queen, perfectionist, truly reluctant international acting star, I do.