According to TVLine, Jenna Ortega (You) reflects on the comments she made regarding the quality of writing during the first season of Netflix’s Wednesday. Last year, during her appearance on Dax Shepard’s (Hit and Run) podcast, Ortega stated how she took it upon herself to rewrite lines of dialogue without consulting the series’ writers first. A little over a year later, she opened up about the situation as she realized she could have chosen her words more carefully.
“I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that. I think, oftentimes, I’m such a rambler,” Ortega told Vanity Fair. “I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better.”
“Everything that I said felt so magnified…. It felt almost dystopian to me,” she continued. “I felt like a caricature of myself…. You’re never going to please everybody, and as someone who naturally was a people pleaser, that was really hard for me to understand. Some people just may not like you… and that’s entirely fine. [In fact] I got sick of myself last year. My face was everywhere… so it’s like, fair enough, if I were opening my phone and I saw the same girl with some stupid quote or something, I would be over it too.”
As per TVLine, during the podcast, Ortega recalls moments in which she seemed almost unprofessional in the way she went about changing lines in the script. “Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all,” she argued. “The script supervisor thought I was going with something, and then I had to sit down with the writers, and they’d be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ I’d have to go and explain why I couldn’t go do certain things.”
Ortega said she “grew very, very protective” of Wednesday Addams during the first season of the series which inspired the script changes to ensure that both the show’s believability as well as Wednesday’s likability. “You can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc, because then it’s boring and nobody likes you,” she said. “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.”
The second season of Wednesday has yet to be released, and the official release date is yet to be announced.