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.”
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