“Death of a Unicorn” star Jenna Ortega has just announced the birth of a career pivot: directing. The actress/producer told V magazine that she plans on directing her own original film that has been in the works for 10 years.
“I have a script that I’ve known that I was going to make for almost 10 years,” she said. “It’s weird because it’s something that I thought of when I was younger and when I first started out in this field, and it’s only now that I’m actually starting to take the steps to get it made.”
Ortega will make her producing debut on Season 2 of Netflix series “Wednesday.” Ortega also has made her passion for screenwriting publicly known: she infamously said in 2023 that she pushed to rewrite the initial scripts for the hit Netflix series. Ortega told Dax Shepard at the time during his “Armchair Expert” podcast that she had to “put my foot down” and “started changing lines” that she disagreed with on set.
Ortega later told Vanity Fair that she “could have used [her] words better in describing all of that” especially amid the WGA strike. “I think, oftentimes, I’m such a rambler. I think it was hard because I felt like had I represented the situation better, it probably would’ve been received better,” Ortega said.
The actress added that the experience with changing scripts led her to start producing.
“I think it’s natural to be fearful of signing your life away and wanting some sort of agency or wanting confirmation that your voice would be heard,” Ortega said of joining the series. “I’m aware of my position as an actor. I know that I’m not in charge….But I think with someone like Wednesday, who is in every scene, it only makes sense for that person to be that involved in what’s going on behind the scenes because she’s onscreen every second of the project.”
She continued, “And then I think a lot of the work that I ended up doing, and a lot of the conversations that I was having were more of a producer’s conversations half the time.”
