“There’s a stigma that that’s all you could do, or you’re just not a serious actor,” she says. So I was like, ‘I’m going to get on a Disney Channel show one day if you just let me act.’ And my mom just kind of like laughed it off and said, ‘Oh yes, we’ll see about that.’ So, that being something that I had promised my parents that I would do, I was thrilled.”īy the time Stuck in the Middle wrapped, Ortega was 16 and ready to move on to the next, post-child star phase of her career. We were all watching Disney Channel in the other room. “When I was trying to convince my parents to let me act, I told my mom, ‘I could get on a Disney show if you wanted me to,’ because I think my siblings were watching. Getting the role, Ortega says, was another career milestone. Then, as it does with so many young actors, came Disney: In 2016, Ortega scored the lead in the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle, which aired for three seasons. “But there’s two seconds where the screen is on me and my mom and my friends screamed. “They cut my entire scene pretty much,” she says. By her 11th birthday, she’d booked her first film role, as the president’s daughter in Iron Man 3. Having nabbed the ultimate role, it was time to graduate to the next step. And that was the greatest, the greatest day. The last McDonald’s commercial I did, I was assigned to be the nugget girl. “But if you’re around McDonald’s and you’re 9 years old, you don’t want to be eating the apples. Two of them I was the apple girl, which is fine,” she says. “I had done three McDonald’s commercials. Within that time period, she booked 12 national campaigns - including a slot as the coveted “McNuggets girl” in a McDonald’s spot. “It’s entirely her fault.”įor the first year, she was encouraged to only audition for commercials as a way to dip her toe into the waters. “It was a direct offer that my mom had accidentally gotten herself into, so I think she felt really bad if she didn’t actually at least let me try,” Ortega says now. Unbeknownst to her, a friend of friend was a casting director who saw the clip and encouraged her to have Ortega come in for a meeting. Thus ensued four years of “begging nonstop” before her mother - mostly jokingly, in true mom fashion - posted a video of Ortega doing a dramatic monologue on Facebook. “I told my mom that I wanted to be the Puerto Rican version of Dakota Fanning,” Ortega recalls. The fourth of six children, Ortega first caught the acting bug when she was 6, after watching Man on Fire, a film starring Denzel Washington and a young Dakota Fanning. Her temporary residence finds Ortega, 19, some 6,000-plus miles from her hometown of Coachella Valley. And it’s actually really beautiful weather right now. You would walk outside and your hands would burn. “It’s nice to be back,” she says of her temporary home (prior to the holidays, she’d been there for four months). On the first Thursday in January, she’s having a rare quiet day, but only because she has to: She’s currently in mandatory isolation after arriving back in Romania, where she is filming Tim Burton’s upcoming Wednesday Addams series for Netflix, having spent the holidays back at home in California. Scream is just the first of many ( many) projects coming up for the actor in 2022. and they start to make you believe that, like, ‘Oh man, maybe I did.’” I’ve done interviews where I think I’ve played it really safe and smart, and honestly have said nothing, but people think I gave away something major. “I feel like anything that I say gets twisted and turned into something that it’s not. “I’ve never been so scared to say something I shouldn’t,” Ortega says. But neither I, beholden to a strict spoiler embargo, nor Ortega, beholden to anxiety over spilling script secrets, is going to share whether what you see is what you’re actually going to get. Basically, once you hear “Would you like to play a game?” it’s, well, game over. This means that over 1.2 million people have seen Jenna Ortega pick up that fateful phone call - presumably, the one that kicks off each film, ending in a character’s gory demise. Since the trailer for the highly anticipated fifth installment of Scream first dropped in mid-October, over 1.2 million people have tuned in to check out the return of Ghostface.
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