Jenna Ortega is one of the biggest names in Hollywood right now, but she just admitted that wasn’t always the plan in her head. Before the world fell in love with her deadpan delivery, she was convinced the whole thing was going to blow up in her face.
The role in question is Wednesday Addams from Wednesday, the character that turned Ortega into a global phenomenon and reshaped Netflix’s entire slate around her. But getting there wasn’t the confident, calculated climb fans might assume. According to Ortega, she had no idea what she was walking into, and the scale of it terrified her before a single episode aired.
Jenna Ortega Reveals the Panic Behind Wednesday’s Success
Ortega recently sat down with Esquire for an interview and opened up about just how blindsided she felt once Wednesday started coming together behind the scenes.
“I thought my career was going to be over after that. I panicked, I had no idea, I was confused. And they started talking about this show and this big release they were doing,” Ortega said, describing the moment the scope of Wednesday started to become clear.
That confusion only grew once production actually started. “We were shooting in Romania and it felt like this small little thing which was naive because Tim Burton was involved,” she said, pointing to the disconnect between how the shoot felt on the ground and what it would eventually become with Burton directing.
Then came the part that gives this story its title. “I saw part of the first episode and I had a mental breakdown,” Ortega admitted, describing her reaction to watching herself on screen for the first time.
Her panic wasn’t really about the performance itself. It came from realizing, almost too late, that a project she’d been treating as a modest overseas shoot was actually a massive Netflix bet with one of Hollywood’s most recognizable directors attached. That gap between how small it felt in Romania and how enormous it looked on screen is what triggered the breakdown, not doubt in her own acting.
It’s a strikingly honest window into how disorienting a breakout role can be, even for someone who’d already been acting for years. Ortega wasn’t new to the industry when Wednesday came along, but nothing in her career up to that point had prepared her for a project of this size, or for Tim Burton’s name being attached to it.
Wednesday went on to become one of Netflix’s biggest hits ever, turning Ortega into the face of the franchise and cementing her as the show’s biggest draw through two seasons.
Given how much anxiety the first season apparently caused her behind the scenes, it’s worth remembering just how close that panic came to overshadowing what turned into a career-defining role.
For anyone catching up, Wednesday follows Wednesday Addams as she’s sent to Nevermore Academy, a boarding school for outcasts, after a string of incidents at her old high school. There she has to navigate a murder mystery tied to the town of Jericho, sharpen her psychic visions, and reluctantly work alongside classmates and a chirpy roommate she wants nothing to do with, all while her family’s dark legacy keeps pulling her back in.
Season two picked up with Nevermore back in session as Wednesday clashed with a new principal, a campus stalker, and a fading grip on her powers, ending on a cliffhanger that left Enid transformed into a full werewolf and several relationships fractured. Season three is currently in production, with a release expected in late 2027.
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