Jenna Ortega (born 2002) is the American actress who plays Wednesday Addams in Wednesday and played Tara Carpenter in Scream (2022) and Scream VI.
The girl who answers the phone at the start of a Scream movie is supposed to die. When Ghostface came for Tara Carpenter in 2022, Jenna Ortega fought back and walked out of the opening scene alive, a first for the series. Ten months later she was Wednesday Addams, in what Netflix counts as its most popular English-language show ever, and she was 20.
Quick Specs
| Born | September 27, 2002, in California’s Coachella Valley (as Jenna Marie Ortega); raised in La Quinta |
| Horror roles | Annie in Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013); Phoebe in The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020); Tara Carpenter in Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023); Skye in Studio 666 (2022); Lorraine in X (2022); Ridley in Death of a Unicorn (2025) |
| Defining role | Wednesday Addams in Netflix’s Wednesday (2022 onward); a producer on season 2 |
| Childhood lead | Harley Diaz in Disney Channel’s Stuck in the Middle (2016 to 2018) |
| Breakout film | The Fallout (2021), directed by Megan Park |
| Emmy record | One nomination, Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Wednesday (75th Emmys); she did not win |
| Other major nominations | Golden Globe and SAG, both for Wednesday |
| Hosted | Saturday Night Live, March 11, 2023 |
| Biggest grosser | Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), as Astrid Deetz |
| Family | Fourth of six children of Edward and Natalie Ortega |
Who She Is
Jenna Marie Ortega was born on September 27, 2002, in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. Sources split on the town of her birth, Rancho Mirage or Palm Desert, but agree that she grew up in La Quinta.
Her father, Edward Ortega, is of Mexican descent. Her mother, Natalie Ortega, is an emergency-room nurse of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent. Jenna is the fourth of six children; her siblings are Isaac, Mariah, Mia, Aliyah and Markus. On her mother’s side, her great-grandmother was an undocumented immigrant from Sinaloa, Mexico, and her grandfather moved from Puerto Rico to the Bronx and then west.
By her own telling, she decided she wanted to act at six, after seeing Dakota Fanning in Man on Fire. She pressed her mother for about three years; her mother steered her toward soccer and school first. When Jenna was nine, her mother bought her a book of monologues and posted a video of her performing one on Facebook. A casting director saw it and signed her to an agency. From then on her mother drove her to auditions in Los Angeles as often as five days a week, six-hour round trips from La Quinta. Casting directors, she has said, often decided she “did not have the look they were going for.”
She went to Amelia Earhart Elementary and John Glenn Middle School in La Quinta, and she left public school in eighth grade after landing Stuck in the Middle.
The Work, and What She Did in It
The Child-Actor Years
Her first screen credits came in 2012: “Girl” in the sitcom Rob, and Aimee Moore in an episode of CSI: NY called “Unspoken.” In Iron Man 3 (2013), released when she was 10, she is the Vice President’s daughter, uncredited. “They took all my lines out,” she has said. “I’m in Iron Man 3 for a quick second. I take up the frame, I have one leg and I’m the vice president’s daughter. They even took my name away. I count that, then I move on.”
Her first horror credit came the same year: Annie, a supporting part in Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013). She played Mary Ann in The Little Rascals Save the Day (2014) and Zoe Leon, recurring, in Rake (2014). On Jane the Virgin (2014 to 2019) she was Young Jane, the flashback younger self of Gina Rodriguez’s heroine, recurring across all five seasons, and Entertainment Weekly praised the work at the time. She was Darcy, a main role, in Richie Rich (2015), and Anna Chapa in After Words (2015).
The lead came with Stuck in the Middle on Disney Channel. Ortega played Harley Diaz, a budding inventor and the middle child of seven, which is close to her own place as the fourth of six. It ran three seasons and 57 episodes, from February 14, 2016, to July 23, 2018, and she was 13 when it premiered. It won her an Imagen Award in 2018. Alongside it she voiced Princess Isabel in Elena of Avalor (2016 to 2020), played the lead, Dawn, in Saving Flora (2018), and guest-starred as Izzy on Bizaardvark (2018).
Her prestige-television step was season 2 of You (2019), as Ellie Alves, a main role, released on December 26, 2019. She also voiced Gabriella Espinosa in Big City Greens and Brooklynn, a main role, in Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous (2020 to 2022).
The Breakout
The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020) put her on Netflix as Phoebe Atwell on September 10, 2020, and the family comedy Yes Day (2021), as Katie Torres, followed on March 12, 2021.
Her critical calling card was The Fallout (2021), Megan Park’s feature debut as writer and director. Ortega plays Vada Cavell. It premiered at SXSW on March 17, 2021, and won the Grand Jury Prize for narrative feature, the Audience Award and the Brightcove Illumination Award, before arriving on HBO Max on January 27, 2022, with a score by Finneas and a Metacritic score of 84. In The Hollywood Reporter, Sheri Linden praised “Ortega’s beautifully nuanced turn”; in Variety, Peter Debruge wrote that she “seems to have found her voice.” It is widely cited as her breakout film role.
Then came 2022, the year that made her a horror name. Scream, the fifth film, directed by Radio Silence and released on January 14, 2022, restages the opening of Scream (1996): Ghostface calls Tara Carpenter at home alone and attacks her through the phone and the smart house. The inversion that defines her run is that the opening victim fights back and survives, a first for the series. The role won her the MTV award for Most Frightened Performance. Scream was made for $24 million and took $81.6 million in North America and $138.9 million worldwide.
The same year she played Skye Willow in Studio 666 (2022), the Foo Fighters’ horror comedy directed by BJ McDonnell, released on February 25, 2022. It was also Taylor Hawkins’s final film appearance; he died on March 25, 2022. In Ti West‘s X, which premiered at SXSW on March 13, 2022, and opened on March 18, she plays Lorraine Day, the churchgoing girlfriend of the crew’s director, who starts out behind the camera. The film’s star is Mia Goth, in a dual role; Ortega’s part is supporting. X was shot at Fordell, New Zealand, in February and March 2021, with its prequel, Pearl, shot back-to-back in secret on the same sets. It took about $14.7 million worldwide. She was also Camila Montes in Diego Hallivis’s American Carnage (2022), released on July 15, 2022, and Mabel in Finestkind, which premiered at TIFF in September 2023.
Scream VI, released on March 10, 2023, moved the survivors to New York and moved Tara from opening victim to co-final girl, alongside Melissa Barrera‘s Sam, as part of the group known as the Core Four. Its budget is reported as $33 million or $35 million depending on the source; it took $108.4 million in North America and $169.1 million worldwide. It brought her a People’s Choice Award and a Critics’ Choice Super Award. The night after it opened, on March 11, 2023, she hosted Saturday Night Live, with The 1975 as musical guest. She was 20.
Wednesday
Wednesday premiered on Netflix on November 23, 2022. Created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, with Tim Burton directing the first four episodes and the show shot in Romania, it casts Ortega as Wednesday Addams, and in flashback as Goody Addams, her 17th-century ancestor. Burton explained why he cast her: “She’s like a silent movie actress. She can convey things without words.” Ortega, by her own tellings, decided that Wednesday should essentially not blink on screen.
The figures, in Netflix’s own words: season 1 “currently holds the record for Netflix’s most-popular English language show of all time with 252.1M views in 91 days.” It crossed a billion hours viewed three weeks after its debut, reached No. 1 in 90 countries and spent six straight weeks at No. 1 on the Netflix Global Top 10, which Netflix calls “still a record for an English TV show.” That crown is for English-language series, counted by views. Squid Game’s first season still leads globally, and Stranger Things 4 has more raw hours.
The awards followed. Ortega was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series at the 75th Emmys, announced on July 12, 2023, when she was 20. She was the second-youngest nominee in the category’s history, after Patty Duke at 17 in 1964, and its youngest Latina nominee, the third Latina nominated after Rita Moreno and America Ferrera. Quinta Brunson won, for Abbott Elementary. Wednesday took 12 nominations that year. Ortega was also nominated for a Golden Globe and a SAG Award, and she won the Critics’ Choice Super Award for Best Actress in a Horror Series and the MTV award for Best Performance in a Show.
Season 2 arrived in two parts, on August 6 and September 3, 2025, with production moved from Romania to Ireland, and with Ortega as a producer. “They were gracious enough to let me put the producer hat on,” she told Elle Fanning in Variety’s Actors on Actors in June 2023, describing it as a natural progression. Gough and Millar said she had “already been closely involved with scripts and creative discussions from the very beginning.” Her preview of the direction: “We’ve decided we want to lean into the horror aspect of the show a little bit more… We’re ditching any romantic love interest for Wednesday, which is really great.” Netflix renewed the show for a third season in July 2025, before season 2 debuted.
The Scream 7 Exit
Ortega does not appear in Scream 7, and the record of why she left has three layers. On November 22, 2023, the day after Melissa Barrera’s firing was reported, Deadline reported that Ortega would not return because of scheduling conflicts with season 2 of Wednesday, due to shoot in Ireland from April 2024; it added that her exit “was discussed before the actors strike” and that no script was ready. Later coverage repeatedly connected her exit to Barrera’s dismissal or to pay, though no statement from the studio or her representatives ever settled either. In April 2025, Ortega gave her own account to The Cut: “It had nothing to do with pay or scheduling. The Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart. If Scream VII wasn’t going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn’t seem like the right move for me in my career at the time.” By the time she decided, she noted, Radio Silence had already left the film.
The Current Run
In Jade Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl (2024), released by Lionsgate on January 26, 2024, she plays Cairo Sweet opposite Martin Freeman’s teacher, Jonathan Miller. The film drew sustained debate over its age gap. Its intimacy coordinator, Kristina Arjona, said Ortega was consulted throughout and was “very determined and very sure of what she wanted to do,” and Freeman defended the film to The Times on the grounds that depicting something is not endorsing it. It was made for $4 million and took under $900,000 worldwide.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) reunited her with Burton, as Astrid Deetz, the daughter of Winona Ryder‘s Lydia. It opened the Venice Film Festival on August 28, 2024, and US theatres on September 6. With a budget reported at $99 million or $100 million, it grossed $452 million worldwide, by far her biggest film.
Winter Spring Summer or Fall, in which she plays Remi Aguilar, premiered at Tribeca on June 6, 2024. In A24’s Death of a Unicorn, released on March 28, 2025, she is Ridley Kintner; it cost $15 million and took $15.9 million worldwide before becoming a streaming hit on Max. “I didn’t foresee unicorns in my career and I don’t think I’ll ever see them again,” she said of it. In Trey Edward Shults’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, released by Lionsgate on May 16, 2025, she plays Anima opposite The Weeknd; it cost $15 million and took about $7.8 million worldwide, with a Rotten Tomatoes score near 14 percent. Abel Tesfaye said of its pivotal scene: “She led that whole scene. None of it was rehearsed, and a lot of my reactions in it are not acting.”
Klara and the Sun, Taika Waititi’s film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, casts her as Klara, an “Artificial Friend” bought as a companion for a sick girl. It premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on October 15, 2026, and opened in US and UK theatres on October 23, 2026, through Sony. Early notices are mixed to negative, with her performance singled out. Next is Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist, which premiered at Sundance on January 24, 2026, with Ortega as Kiki Gorman, assistant to Natalie Portman’s gallery owner; it opens in US theatres on December 4, 2026.
Cool Verified Facts
- She choreographed Wednesday’s famous dance herself. In episode 4, “Woe What a Night,” Wednesday dances at the Rave’N to The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck.” The viral TikTok version is a fan edit set to a sped-up Lady Gaga “Bloody Mary,” which does not play in the scene.
- Her MTV wins: Most Frightened Performance for Scream (2022) and Best Performance in a Show for Wednesday (2023).
- Her Critics’ Choice Super Awards: Best Actress in a Horror Series for Wednesday (2023) and Best Actress in a Horror Movie for Scream VI (2024).
- She won People’s Choice Drama Movie Star of the Year for Scream VI (2024).
- The Austin Film Critics Association gave her its Breakthrough Artist Award in January 2023, citing The Fallout, Scream, X and Studio 666 together.
- She won the Imagen Award for Best Young Actor in Television in 2018 for Stuck in the Middle, one win from four nominations.
- She has never appeared in American Horror Story; her prestige-TV credit of that period is You.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
“I choreographed that myself!” she said of the dance. “I’m not a dancer, and I’m sure that’s obvious. I’d gotten the song about a week before, and I just pulled from whatever I could.” The influences she named were Siouxsie Sioux, Bob Fosse’s “Rich Man’s Frug,” Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday in the 1960s, Lene Lovich, and archive footage of 1980s goth-club dancing. She shot it on her first day with COVID; MGM said strict protocols were followed and she was removed from set once the positive test was confirmed. The fan remix took on a life of its own, with recreations by Madonna and the figure skater Kamila Valieva, and Netflix acknowledged it in its renewal video.
She has been frank about the work. On Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert in March 2023 she said: “I don’t think I’ve ever had to put my foot down more on a set in a way that I had to on Wednesday,” and described changing lines: “There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense, where I just started changing lines.” The producer Steven DeKnight, who never worked on Wednesday or with Ortega, called the remarks “beyond entitled and toxic” on Twitter, then retracted within days, on March 15, 2023: “She’s an amazing talent. It was just an unfortunate situation to expose creative differences publicly, and also I’ll admit that writers are on edge because of the impending strike, myself included. A perfect storm.” During the 2023 writers’ strike, the writer Brandon Cohen carried a picket sign reading “Without writers, Jenna Ortega will have nothing to punch up!” and said it was a compliment, calling her “one of us.” Gough and Millar issued no public rebuttal. Looking back in 2024, Ortega told Vanity Fair: “I probably could have used my words better in describing all of that.”
Profiles have dubbed her a scream queen since 2022. It is a label, and the credits it gets pinned to are Insidious: Chapter 2, The Babysitter: Killer Queen, two Scream films, X, Studio 666, Wednesday and Death of a Unicorn.
Why She Matters
Ortega is the rare modern horror star who got there by surviving. Since 1996 the Scream films had killed the girl on the phone; hers lived, and then became a co-lead of the sequel. Wednesday turned a horror-adjacent character into Netflix’s most popular English-language show by views, with a lead who choreographed her own dance and argued for her own lines.
She has also shown that a horror name can steer. She took a producer credit at 20, said the next season would lean harder into horror, and when the Scream franchise she had helped revive lost the people she trusted, she walked away and later explained why in her own words.