Jenna Ortega Never Made Playing Wednesday Look Easy — And She’s Finally Explained Why

Jenna Ortega may have made Wednesday Addams look effortlessly iconic on screen, but behind the cameras, the role has come with a set of challenges she’s been openly candid about from the very beginning.

When Netflix’s Wednesday was still in pre-production, Ortega spoke with SlashFilm about the fundamental difficulty of bringing a teenage Wednesday Addams to life in an eight-episode series. Unlike previous versions of the character — most memorably Christina Ricci’s portrayal in the 1990s Addams Family films — this take required Wednesday to carry a full emotional arc across an extended runtime while still staying completely faithful to her iconic deadpan, emotionless personality. Ortega acknowledged early on that threading that needle was genuinely tricky, describing the process of giving Wednesday enough depth to push the story forward without softening the edges that make her who she is as one of the most interesting creative puzzles she’d encountered.

The series was filmed in Bucharest, Romania, under the direction of Tim Burton, whom Ortega has described as one of the most detail-oriented directors in the genre. Shooting in an unfamiliar country while simultaneously inhabiting such a well-known character added another layer of pressure to an already demanding production.

That pressure didn’t ease once the cameras stopped rolling. In a conversation with Olivia Rodrigo for The Face, Ortega admitted that the self-doubt she managed to keep at bay during filming came flooding back once production wrapped. Despite appearing in almost every scene, she found herself lying awake at night second-guessing decisions she had made during shooting — wondering whether she had done justice to a character that so many viewers had grown up loving.

The physical and logistical demands of the show proved equally relentless. Speaking on the Big Bro with Kid Cudi podcast, Ortega reflected on what it actually feels like to be the lead of a major Netflix production, describing days that stretched to 16 hours of scheduled activity — filming, line preparation, wardrobe, choreography, and back again, five or six days a week with almost no personal time in between. She described the experience as reaching a point of near sleepwalking, where the repetition of the routine could start to dull the creative instinct if she wasn’t careful.

Even with two full seasons of the character behind her, Ortega told CinemaBlend that the core creative challenge hasn’t gone away. Finding the line between Wednesday being genuinely cutting and tipping into mean-spirited territory is still a daily on-set conversation, with takes regularly being pulled back and reassessed. As she put it, it’s a very fine line, and one she takes seriously every time she steps in front of the camera.

Off set, Ortega’s relationship with the show’s writing also drew public attention when comments she made in 2023 about rewriting certain scenes that didn’t feel true to the character sparked a wider conversation. The show’s creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, addressed the situation diplomatically, ultimately embracing Ortega as a producer on the series going into Season 2 — a move that gave her greater creative input and helped channel her instincts constructively.

Wednesday Season 3 is currently in production, with a release expected sometime in 2027.