Jenna Ortega didn’t just play Wednesday Addams; she became her. The 20-year-old opened up to Dax Shepard on his Armchair Expert podcast about her experience embodying the spooky teen. From the beginning Ortega had questions about the script. “When I first signed onto the show, I didn’t have all the scripts. I thought it was going to be a lot darker. It wasn’t,” she said. The original conception of Wednesday was geared toward a younger audience, she explained.
“Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” she continued, which led to changes she made in real-time while filming—without giving writers a heads-up. “There was a line about a dress she has to wear for a school dance and she says, ‘Oh, my God, I love it. Ugh, I can’t believe I said that. I literally hate myself.’ I had to go, ‘No.’” Ortega instead portrayed the scene, which featured the viral “Wednesday Dance” that fans recreated on social media, more true to her vision of Wednesday.
When advocating for Wednesday’s character, Ortega admitted, “There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines.”
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Wednesday writers originally planned for the titular character to be broody and emotionally detached, but Ortega felt it made her too dull. “You can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you. When you are little and say very morbid, offensive stuff, it’s funny and endearing. But then you become a teenager and it’s nasty and you know it. There’s less of an excuse.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to put my foot down more on a set in a way that I had to on Wednesday,” she added.
