Jenna Ortega stated that she didn’t expect Wednesday to become such a major hit, and that she didn’t believe anyone would watch it.
She was so incorrect!
The Addams Family spin-off has amassed millions of viewers worldwide since its Netflix debut, creating viral trends on social media and an unsurprising greenlight for season 2.
Yet, Jenna, 20, believed that the show would be a ‘wonderful little treasure’ that people stumble discover on the streaming site when they were working on it.
‘I didn’t expect the reaction. The 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,’ she said.
Continuing to The Sunday Times, the Scream VI actor added: ‘So I thought it wasn’t going to be watched. That it will be a nice little gem that someone finds.’
Jenna, who rose to fame as a child actor in the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle and played the younger version of Gina Rodriguez’s main character in Jane the Virgin, admitted that she felt “so out of place” in her early career.
She recounted how, while on the Disney show, she became a ‘little bit of a public figure’ and was recognised in public, but she now felt she 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,’ she stated.
‘I didn’t really feel like myself. Then it started to slow down and I lived a pretty normal life.’
All of that changed with Jenna’s performance in Wednesday, which won her nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Golden Globes, and a win at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.
Jenna recently spoke out against a certain subplot in Wednesday, stating that the love triangle involving her protagonist and two other characters didn’t ‘make sense’.
She also told Jimmy Fallon that she wants Wednesday to be free of her ‘romantic predicament’ in the second season, ‘and just let her be her own individual and fight her own crime’.
Wednesday is available to watch on Netflix.
