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In 1937, the aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart vanished into an abyss above the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen again. A captivating mystery, sure. Had a nice bit of staying power. But did she act in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before? Don’t think so! Today the world’s most fascinating disappearing acts occur via Netflix, a streamer that – for all its many successes – has always struggled to stop their biggest names from falling down the back of the pop culture sofa. Noah Centineo? Regé-Jean Page? Basically all the kids from Stranger Things? A search party is surely needed. So how, then, has Wednesday’s Jenna Ortega become one of the biggest movie stars on the planet?
The massive success of Tim Burton’s long-in-the-works sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – which grossed $110m (£83m) at the US box office this weekend – provided some useful data for anyone still doubting Ortega’s A-list bonafides. Deadline reported that Warner Bros were quick to tap into the 21-year-old’s 38 million followers on Instagram, and that she was the principal lure for the film’s Gen-Z audience. Her presence in last year’s Scream VI also helped it become the most successful film in that franchise since 1997’s Scream 2, and she was key to people talking about the generally risible age-gap thriller Miller’s Girl earlier this year. Next on the docket are movies directed by JJ Abrams and Taika Waititi. In short: Jenna Ortega is in demand.
Somewhat unusually, the show that propelled Ortega into uber-fame – a spin-off of the sullen Addams Family tween popularised by Christina Ricci in the Nineties movies – is now more or less an afterthought. Despite Ortega’s penchant for playing mumbly goth girls and starring in horror movies (her credits also include Ti West’s X and a forthcoming top-secret thriller rumoured to be a stealth remake of Misery in which she kidnaps pop star The Weeknd), she is not wedded in the cultural consciousness to Wednesday. It’s by no means her Buffy, or her Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It’s not the character that she’ll forever be associated with. And perhaps that’s because she’s always seemed a bit… cooler?
Ortega had to be convinced to star in the show (“I’d already been there and done that with teen shows,” she said in 2022) and notoriously had a lot to say about the production of its first season. She criticised the decision to give Wednesday a love triangle subplot, as well as the series’ general lightness of touch. “I thought it was going to be a lot darker,” she said in 2023. “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 … There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines.”
She got a little bit of backlash for this, but – more generally – it seemed to crystallise the idea of Ortega as a tough and decisive young actor, with strong opinions and a fearlessness when it comes to expressing them. That Wednesday was, creatively speaking, sort of a dustbin fire only strengthened the feeling that its star was right all along.
It’s arguably that slight detachment from the Netflix machine that has made Ortega as big as she is. Other Netflix stars seem to wholly embrace the company – Stranger Things breakout Millie Bobby Brown, for instance, has now made five movies with the streamer, including Enola Holmes and Damsel, and has just set up a Netflix adaptation of her ghostwritten, um, “novel” Nineteen Steps. Noah Centineo, meanwhile, parlayed his To All the Boys fame into a series of identikit Netflix romcoms, and he’s currently starring in a potentially made-up Netflix action show called The Recruit. Regé-Jean Page was last seen playing third-fiddle to a slumming-it Ryan Gosling in the risible Netflix action film The Gray Man.
Netflix has an uncanny ability to turn actual movie stars into little more than pretty avatars bumbling around anonymous bits of content – did anyone click onto Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg’s action romcom The Union last month, or Nicole Kidman’s A Family Affair a few weeks earlier? It means those propelled to fame by Netflix itself have even more hurdles to overcome. “You’re the most famous person in the world for a while,” Haunting of Hill House star Oliver Jackson-Cohen told The Independent in January. “Then the next show comes along and that completely takes over.”
Because we watch all of these films and series on our TVs – or, if you feel like upsetting the Christopher Nolans in your life, our phones – we’re quite literally used to seeing these people miniaturised. They struggle to convey that essential, otherworldly, movie-star glamour because they’re not being presented that way. Call it a modern variation on “the Friends curse” of the Nineties – why pay £15 to watch Jennifer Aniston in a not-very-good romantic comedy when I can watch her weekly for free on Channel 4?
That said, when it comes to Ortega specifically, there’s a good chance she’s better at all of this movie-star stuff because she just loves movies. One of the great pleasures of the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice press tour has been witnessing her boundless enthusiasm for cinema of all stripes – her casual references to La Haine and Brief Encounter, her love of Harry Dean Stanton, how naturally she’s bonded with her cinephile co-star Winona Ryder. It’s no real wonder that she’s carving out such an interesting film career already.
Compare her, depressingly, to someone like Millie Bobby Brown, who has spoken about her complete disinterest in films. “I don’t watch movies,” she said earlier this year. “People come up to me and say, ‘You should definitely watch this movie, it would change your life’. And I’m like, ‘How long do I have to sit there for?’ Because my brain and I don’t even like sitting for my own movies.”
When your contemporaries are so inclined, it’s pretty easy to move to the front of the pack.
