Sometimes more weight is given to the actors than they really have in a production or in the final result of the play. But, in the case of Wednesday, there are more and more doubts about what the series would have been like if Tim Burton, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the creators, had not trusted Jenna Ortega. And it is that, as the actress has revealed in the Armchair Expert podcast, she felt the need to change a multitude of scenes, including the moment of the dance that viralized the series on social networks: “I don’t think I have ever had to impose myself on a set the way I had to with Wednesday.”
In an in-depth interview with the show’s hosts, actors Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, Ortega revealed that he disagreed with many of the creative decisions made by Gough and Millar, the writers known for their work on Smallville. Some examples? He hated that Wednesday Addams, his character, was involved in a love triangle because “it didn’t make any sense.”
There was also a line of dialogue that was especially annoying to him, when he saw Wednesday find a dress to go to the school dance and say the following: “Oh my God, I love it. Ugh, I don’t believe I said this. I literally hate myself.” After seeing the line, which she found inconsistent with her character, she felt that she had to say, “No, no way.”
The issue is that he considered that the script was not always faithful to the essence of Wednesday Addams, who he thought would have a darker and more adult tone when he accepted the project: “Everything he does, everything I had to interpret, had no It didn’t make sense to the character in any way.”
“I became very, very protective of her [Wednesday], but you can’t lead a story and not have an emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you,” she explained about a creation process in which she adopted an attitude ” almost unprofessional” by getting used to changing lines of dialogue. The script supervisor, in fact, had to ask her for explanations on numerous occasions when he saw that she altered the text: “So I had to go there and explain to her why she couldn’t do certain things.”
And, in the case of the dance, it completely altered the essence of the scene. In the initial script, Jenna Ortega had to start a dance at Nevermore for the rest of the students to join later, as if it were a flashmob. But why would she Wednesday accept that situation when she is precisely characterized by being antisocial? So she criticized the scene, she refused to work with a choreographer and decided to create the dance herself (which she danced sick with covid as she had previously revealed and the producers confirmed).
The 20-year-old Ortega’s statements are surprising for their frankness. It is not usual for an actress to criticize the lack of coherence in a series she is working on: Katherine Heigl did the same with Grey’s Anatomy, creator Shonda Rhimes became obsessed with it and Hollywood ignored her for years. Wednesday is also the vehicle that has catapulted her to unquestionable stardom in which she had been working for years after roles in series like You and Jane the virgin or horror movies like X or the Scream saga.
Of course, in the second season confirmed by Netflix, the actress will have more power: she has renegotiated the contract to also have the title of executive producer, so she will have a say in the gestation process of the new episodes.
For Netflix it is one of the jewels in the crown: it accumulated more than 1,200 million hours watched in its first four weeks in the catalogue, becoming the most watched English-language series in the history of the platform, only behind the fifth season. from Stranger things. Its success, moreover, was not temporary: 15 weeks after its premiere, it remains among the most viewed productions on the streaming service.
