Jenna Ortega Was Ready To Quit Acting Until She Got Cast On You
A very rare "thank you" to Joe Goldberg.
Jenna Ortega is one of the most in-demand actors of the moment, but things were almost very different. The star revealed that she seriously considered quitting the industry when she aged out of child actor roles. But one pivotal series convinced her to keep acting into her adulthood.
“When I was a teenager, I'd gotten off a children's show, and I didn't know what I was going to do,” Ortega said on the April 8 episode of Kid Cudi's Big Bro podcast. “I had to prove myself and meet all these new casting directors who didn't know who I was.”
This would’ve been around 2018, when Ortega’s Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle ended. At the time, she was 15 years old, and thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to put acting behind her and focus on having a normal high school experience. “It just felt like a good time to call it quits if I was going to,” Ortega recalled. “I was starting high school, and, ‘it was a good run' sort of thing.”
However, the young star changed her tune once she landed her more grown-up part on Season 2 of the psychological thriller You. “We had talked about it for a few months with my team. And then, I think I booked that show You, and then I went on that set, and I loved it and had the best time,” Ortega said. “I thought, ‘Yeah, there's no way I could let this go.’”
Ortega starred as the precocious Los Angelino Ellie Alves in You’s second season. Though Ellie played an integral role in the series, serving as Joe Goldberg’s unwitting partner in crime during the L.A. storyline, she surprisingly did not return in any subsequent seasons, despite many a fan theory. You’s showrunner Sera Gamble confirmed that although there were bigger plans for Ellie, Ortega’s busy schedule after securing the lead role in Wednesday prevented her from being able to reappear.
Of course, Ortega went on to huge success after her decision to remain an actor. She’s helmed Netflix’s darkly comedic Wednesday since 2022, and has become one of Gen Z’s most iconic scream queens thanks to horror movies like Scream, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and Death of a Unicorn.
