‘Wednesday’ star Jenna Ortega shares how she deals with being ‘the deadpan girl’

Ever since she was cast as Wednesday Addams, Jenna Ortega has been known as “the deadpan girl,” and her role in Scream VI doesn’t make it any better. It’s become a bit of a trend for Ortega to portray stereotypically “goth” characters with barely any range of emotion, but the 20-year-old worries that she’s starting to get typecast.

In a roundtable discussion for The Hollywood Reporter, Ortega was joined by fellow comedy actresses Sheryl Lee Ralph, Ayo Edebiri, Devery Jacobs, and Natasha Lyonne. The ladies discussed all manner of issues in Hollywood, namely the discrimination they’ve faced for being female or the struggles they’ve individually conquered as actresses in their respective genres. For Ortega, she’s become something of a scream queen in recent years for her roles in the Scream franchise and Ti West’s slasher X.

And her role as Wednesday Addams essentially confirmed Ortega as a “goth” girl to the public, which wasn’t made any better by the fact that Wednesday — traditionally — is devoid of remorse, compassion, and any emotion at all, really. Ortega spoke out about how she hopes to avoid being typecast for these kinds of roles in the future, assuring everyone of her range.

ORTEGA: “For me, I used to do Disney, and it was that for a while. Now I’m the deadpan girl. People come up to me and ask me to ‘do the thing.'”

EDEBIRI: “Just remove any emotion?”

ORTEGA: “Exactly. Or if I don’t have a lot of expression one day, it’s, ‘Oh, she’s doing that thing again!’ So I know what it’s like to feel like I’m fighting some sort of image. But I feel like I’m in a position now and I’m getting familiar enough with my work that I know when I do jobs, I just want them to mean something to me. It’s also surreal and hard for me to grasp everything that’s happened in the last six months.”

And the last six months really have been a whirlwind for Ortega, who’s made a name for herself as not only a horror icon but also a comedy legend. Even at such a young age, she’s outshining a lot of older talent and constantly becoming the talk of the town almost every week for some reason or another.

Ortega is scheduled to appear in Beetlejuice 2 in 2024, which might feed that stereotype some more, but then she’s deviating from both horror and comedy altogether to appear in the crime-thriller Finestkind.