Jenna Ortega just reminded everyone that even the careers that look inevitable from the outside had a moment where they very nearly did not happen at all.
Jenna Ortega says this movie saved her acting career
The 23-year-old Wednesday star opened up during an appearance on Kid Cudi’s Big Bro podcast, published April 8, revealing that she came genuinely close to leaving the industry for good after her Disney Channel run came to an end.
“When I was a teenager, I’d gotten off a children’s show, and I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she told Cudi. “I had to prove myself and meet all these new casting directors who didn’t know who I was.“
What made the decision feel real rather than abstract was the timing. Ortega was about to start high school, and the idea of just living a normal life for a while was not some passing thought.
She and her team had been talking about it for months. “It just felt like a good time to call it quits if I was going to. I was starting high school, and ‘it was a good run’ sort of thing,” she said.
Then came You. She booked the role of Ellie Alves in Season 2 of the Netflix thriller, and everything changed the moment she stepped on set.
“I went on that set and I loved it and had the best time,” she said. “I thought, ‘Yeah, there’s no way I could let this go.'”
Ortega also reflected on the less glamorous side of the job that she had not been able to fully name when she was younger, but has since learned to acknowledge.
She called it “a really easy thought to have,” noting that “there’s so much that comes with the job that no one can really prepare you for.”
She has been open in recent years about the toll the immediate aftermath of Wednesday Season 1 took on her personally, describing herself at the time as an unhappy person struggling with the intensity of sudden widespread attention as someone who is naturally introverted.
She also mentioned recently having her first real stretch of time off from production in years and not quite knowing what to do with herself.
The answer, apparently, was cooking and repainting her kitchen cabinets herself, which is very much the kind of detail that makes Jenna Ortega feel like an actual person and not just a career trajectory.
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