At 20, Ortega has already been performing in front of cameras for half her life, and she has the self-assurance to match. She grew up the fourth of sixth children in a Mexican neighbourhood in La Quinta, California, in the Coachella Valley, where she caught the acting bug as a young child.

“I saw Dakota Fanning in Man on Fire and told my parents, ‘Guys, I’m going to be the Puerto Rican Dakota Fanning,’” she said, trees flashing past as she walked through the city in a green turtleneck, big black headphones wrapped around her neck. (Her father is of Mexican descent; her mother’s heritage is Mexican and Puerto Rican.)

She spent the next three years “begging nonstop” to be an actor before her mother, an emergency room nurse, bought her a book of monologues and posted a video of her performing one to Facebook when she was 9. A casting director saw it, and within a year, Ortega had booked her first TV role, on the short-lived sitcom Rob, with Rob Schneider.

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A cascade of roles followed, including young Jane in Jane the Virgin when she was 10 and, when she was 12, a lead role as Harley Diaz in the Disney Channel sitcom Stuck in the Middle (2016-18). A month later, she withdrew from her eighth-grade classes to pursue her Disney dream.

Stuck in the Middle lasted three seasons, after which Ortega was eager to book more mature roles. But her Disney experience, she discovered, came with limitations.

“There’s a huge stigma that comes with being a Disney kid,” she said. “People automatically make the assumption that it’s all you can do, or all you were meant for.”

But things soon picked up: In 2018, she was cast opposite Penn Badgley in the second season of the psychological thriller You, then landed her first of several horror roles in The Babysitter: Killer Queen in 2020.

“There’s a huge stigma that comes with being a Disney kid. People automatically make the assumption that it’s all you can do.”

Actor Jenna Ortega, star of the new Netflix show Wednesday

Her breakout role came in The Fallout, released in January, which focuses on the aftermath of a high school shooting. It was Megan Park’s directorial debut and Ortega’s first time leading a film. It was also widely acclaimed.

“Her ability to know when to give her all and when to hold back, to have that understanding of herself as a performer at such a young age, is really rare,” Park said in a recent phone conversation.

When the creators and showrunners of Wednesday, Al Gough and Miles Millar, began developing their lead character, they didn’t want to follow the typical shy-to-confident arc of teenage female protagonists. The two men each have two teenage daughters. They knew better.

“Wednesday starts strong and stays that way,” Millar said. “She’s unapologetic, fearless, smart, weird – it’s very rare to see a female teen character who’s that sure of herself.”

After writing the first four episodes, they had only one director in mind: Burton, who had passed on the Addams Family movie in 1991 because of a scheduling conflict.

“We thought he probably wouldn’t even read it,” Gough said of Burton, who hadn’t directed a television series since the 1980s. “We thought we’d have higher odds of winning the Powerball.”

To their surprise, Burton called them four days after receiving the script for the first episode.

“It brought up memories of my school days,” Burton, who also served as an executive producer, said. “The characters were the reason I wanted to do it; I didn’t have the burning desire to do, necessarily, television.”

But bringing their collective vision to fruition was going to require the perfect Wednesday. They auditioned hundreds of actresses, but Ortega brought to the character the empathy they were looking for.

“She’s like a silent-film actress,” Burton said. “She emotes with her eyes.”

Zeta-Jones said she was impressed by Ortega’s assertiveness in protecting her vision of Wednesday.

“She was not intimidated by Tim,” she said. “He’s this great director, but she’d question him – ‘I’ll do it that way, but can we also try it this way?’ – and that’d be the take they took.”

Ortega said it was impossible, though, to completely overlook the pressure of stepping into a role immortalised by Ricci, who plays a newly created character in this series, that of the most “normal” teacher at the school.

“With a character that iconic, you want to do her justice,” Ortega said.

Wednesday is on Netflix.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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