Jenna Ortega has revealed there was one line in Wednesday that she refused to say.
The 20-year-old actor plays Wednesday Addams in the hit Netflix series – a new re-imagining of Charles Addams’s iconic Addams Family.
The line in question comes in the fourth episode of the series, based around her school’s annual dance.
Wednesday is seen eyeing up a dress in the window of an antique shop, while out with Thing.
Later in the episode, she is hunting around her room for something to wear, and finds that Thing had stolen the dress for her.
She gives the disembodied hand a grateful look – but it turns out that Ortega used to have a line of dialogue during the sequence.
“I remember there’s a line where I’m talking about a dress and initially she was supposed to say: ‘Oh my God I’m freaking out over a dress, I literally hate myself’,” the actor said, during a Netflix Q&A.
“And I was blown away because that sounded like… it was just a bunch of little things like that,” she explained. “I felt like we were able to avoid a lot of dialogue in an attempt to make her sound human.”
Fans of the series praised Ortega for making the cut, with many agreeing that it wouldn’t have worked for her usually deadpan character.
“Gotta give credits to actors who know their characters better than the writers sometimes,” one fan wrote on TikTok.
That same episode featured what might be the series’ most talked-about scene, in which Wednesday performs a dance at the school prom.
In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Ortega revealed that she was unable to sleep for days before filming the dance scene.
“I felt like such a fool,” she said. “I’m not a dancer. I don’t do any of that. I have no experience in that field. And then I didn’t sleep for two days.”
Wednesday has been a huge hit for Netflix, and recently beat serial killer drama Dahmer to a major viewership milestone.
