The youngest of the Golden Globes
At just 20 years old, American actress Jenna Marie Ortega bursts onto the screen, playing the teenager Wednesday Addams in the hit fantasy series broadcast on Netflix since the end of November. Wednesday. This role gives him his first nomination for the 2023 Golden Globes, in the category Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy Television Series. In an interview for wired, in November, the youngest nominee of the ceremony remembers her audition with the director Tim Burton, for this new adaptation of The Adams Family : “I was coming out of the filming of the horror film X, I still had fake blood and a large scar on my face. I logged on to Zoom and Tim Burton burst out laughing. »
A madwoman of castings
Born September 27, 2002 in Coachella, California, Jenna Ortega comes from a Mexican-Puerto Rican family of six children. From the age of 6, inspired by the American actress Dakota Fanning, she dreams of doing the same job. Faced with his stubbornness, his mother, who is an emergency nurse, offers him to work on a long monologue. “I played her and she then posted it on her Facebook account,” tells Jenna Ortega at Wired. An old acquaintance of her mother comes across the video and talks about it to a casting director friend, who contacts her immediately. At the age of 9, she began to chain the auditions: “Four to five times a week, my mother would drive me to Los Angeles, a seven-hour drive there and back, to go to castings”she says on the set of comedian Jimmy Kimmel, on ABC.
A horror scream queen
She first appeared on screen in commercials for Colgate and McDonald’s, then landed minor roles in The Experts: Manhattan, Where Iron Man 3. At 12, she made a name for herself by playing the secondary role of Jane Villanueva as a child in the series Jane the Virgin. A time muse of Disney Channel, she plays in Harley, the least of my worries, and landed in 2019 one of the main roles in the series You. After several appearances on the big screen – Saving Flora (2018), Yes Day (2021) –, Jenna Ortega makes a place for herself in horror cinema where her cries of dread make her a “ scream queen ». She notably plays in The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020), by Joseph McGinty Nichol, as well as the last two installments of the famous horror franchise Scream.
Support for undocumented migrants
On June 22, 2018, at the Radio Disney Music Awards in Los Angeles, Jenna Ortega flaunted a jacket that read “I do care and U should too” (“I care and you should too”). The day before, Melania Trump had visited undocumented children at the Mexican border with the inscription on her jacket “I really don’t care, do U? » (“I don’t really care, do you?”). Committed on several fronts, Jenna Ortega also defends a better representation of diversity in cinema. In Forbes, she said in July 2018: “It’s important for young girls to see [des actrices de couleur] encourage them to embrace their differences. »