Death of a Unicorn is in theaters now. Hurry Up Tomorrow is out May 16.
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Jenna Ortega has just come from the dog park. Outside, at a diner in Burbank, her black whippet terrier, Stinky, chews on a paper water bowl at her feet. The pup was adopted in Dublin last year when Ortega filmed the second season of Wednesday, but thanks to her globe-trotting mother, Stinky already has three passports. “In Paris, she went by Écureuil, which is the French word for squirrel,” says Ortega, who was there this past winter. “She was like, ‘The dogs here speak French.’”
Ortega, 22, is savoring a rare stint in L.A. Dressed in jeans, a white long-sleeved shirt, and a vintage olive workman’s jacket that reads DON, she seems relaxed on this March morning — probably because her fellow diners are close to retirement and unlikely to be among her nearly 40 million Instagram followers, the majority of whom she gained after stepping into the chunky black shoes of Wednesday Addams in 2022. She’s back on the West Coast to promote the creature-feature comedy Death of a Unicorn — think Jurassic Park if the dinosaurs had a massive grudge against the Sackler family — written and directed by Alex Scharfman in his feature debut. When the script arrived in her inbox several years ago, she read it in one sitting, which is a litmus test for projects at a time when she can afford to be picky. Ortega built a career out of clever slashers like Ti West’s X, the Scream reboots, and Megan Park’s powerful school-shooting drama, The Fallout. But being the face of the most popular English-language series on Netflix has granted her a new level of creative control.
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Death of a Unicorn is the latest release from A24 and marks fresh territory for a company better known for prestige horror and boundary-pushing dramas. Ortega, who also serves as executive producer, enjoyed the distributor’s “less refined, more charming” approach to marketing it, premiering the film at South by Southwest and selling a “lamp” in the shape of a unicorn horn on its merch site. In the film, Ortega is again alterna-coded, wearing a nose ring and a maroon-tipped shag as Ridley, an angsty teen at odds with her widowed corporate-lawyer father (Paul Rudd), who hits the titular beast with a car on their way to visit his wealthy clients. Ridley is emotionally raw, often pleading with the Leopold family (played by Richard E. Grant, Téa Leoni, and Will Poulter) to stop exploiting the animal’s healing properties. Ortega had the impossible job of keeping a straight face amid the chaos of a unicorn rampage involving Poulter’s short-shorts-wearing, unicorn-horn-snorting heir. “You know when you laugh so hard you cry?” she says. “I used that as emotion.”
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The cast was a crucial draw for Ortega. She and Rudd bonded over their mutual love of Grant’s 1987 black comedy, Withnail and I. “We were freaking out in the corner trying to get him to say, ‘I feel like a pig shat in my head,’” says Ortega, adding that Rudd gave her an original poster of the film as a wrap gift. Ortega doesn’t care for the term old soul — “It’s an easy way to get inside someone’s head,” she says — but she has a history of playing characters who outsmart their elders and a knack for bonding with colleagues old enough to play her parents. “All of us felt pretty quickly that the sagelike figure of the entire production was Jenna,” says Rudd. “She seems to be from another time.” Rudd recalls getting “in the weeds” with Ortega over the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and notes that she turned him on to the ’70s Renaissance-folk outfit Amazing Blondel. “Music, films, books — all kinds of things that she would talk about that most people don’t know, regardless of their age,” he says.
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Most audiences associate Ortega with bringing a new generation of fans to properties that got their start in the past millennium. In the two most recent installments of the rebooted Scream franchise, she and Melissa Barrera survived Ghostface as the Carpenter sisters. Fans rooted for both to return, but in November 2023, the producer, Spyglass Media Group, announced that Barrera had been fired from the forthcoming seventh installment for remarks she made about the Israel-Hamas war on Instagram. A day later, news broke that Ortega was leaving the film as well. “It had nothing to do with pay or scheduling,” says Ortega, despite initial reports to the contrary. By the time she’d decided to leave, she says, her Scream VI directors, Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, had already exited the film. “The Melissa stuff was happening, and it was all kind of falling apart,” she continues. “If Scream VII wasn’t going to be with that team of directors and those people I fell in love with, then it didn’t seem like the right move for me in my career at the time.”
In an era bloated with reboots, Ortega doesn’t take the decision to star in another revival lightly. Last year, she appeared in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the daughter of Winona Ryder’s iconic Lydia Deetz. During the press tour, Ryder, who became one of Ortega’s closest friends, joked that she and director Tim Burton were waiting for Ortega to be born to do the long-awaited sequel. “I’ve happened to join a lot of franchises, which is so great to be a part of legacy,” says Ortega, slipping Stinky a bacon-y treat. “But for me, I’m really trying to prioritize new directors and original stories. I know on the outside, maybe people are looking at my choices like, Man, what the hell is this girl doing? I never thought I would do a movie with unicorns. But an original script is exciting. If I can help get it made, I love to do that.”
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Ortega grew up in the Coachella Valley the fourth of six siblings and got into acting young, starring in Jane the Virgin and, later, Disney’s Stuck in the Middle. Her mom, an ER nurse, lived in the Southern California desert near Ortega’s maternal grandfather, who moved from Puerto Rico to the Bronx and eventually settled in the West. He came out later in life and would perform in drag at a club called Daddy Warbucks, using the competition prizes to provide for his family. Ortega was born after he died from AIDS-related complications, but her mom tells her she resembles him — she has his eyes. Her passion for performing might stem from him, too. “I kind of have the same instincts that he does,” Ortega says.
When she briefly moved back into her childhood home during the pandemic, she gave herself a crash course in auteur-driven cinema, falling in love with Mike Leigh’s Naked and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, the ending of which helped inspire Ortega’s choreography for the much-memed Wednesday dance. “She has a very deep knowledge of niche pop culture and films,” says Emma Myers, who plays Wednesday’s roommate Enid. “She never makes me feel dumb about not knowing them.” Ortega takes her Gen Z peers seriously enough to trust that they’ll appreciate the references. “Part of the reason why studios are freaking out is because nobody knows why things hit the way that they do, and you can never premeditate that, but there’s a sense of urgency for individuality,” she says of her fan base.
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Ortega has added more of her influence on Wednesday now that she’s a producer. “I feel a bit more empowered to speak my mind,” she says. In 2023, Ortega hit a nerve during the writers strike for saying on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that she took liberties with Wednesday scripts when she felt they weren’t faithful to the character, sometimes without asking. “I used my words really poorly,” she says. “All I had to do was say ‘improvised.’ You live and you learn.” According to Ortega, the incident didn’t affect her relationship with executive producer–director Tim Burton or the series’ creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. “I spend so much time with those guys,” she says. “They trust me enough to know what Wednesday would think and do.”
For the second season, Ortega met with Burton in a trailer every morning, as she always did. “Tim and I would talk with the writers, cross out lines, and they would supplement new ones,” she says. She was looped in on the prosthetics of the latest villain and sat in on casting calls and chemistry reads. A new 13-year-old character will be introduced this season, and Ortega didn’t want to spook anyone auditioning for the part. “All the girls coming in were 8 to 16, and I can only imagine how scary that must’ve been. It’s a vulnerable age,” she says. “I would try to hide as much as I could because I do have the RBF thing going,” she adds, though it’s hard to tell behind her sunglasses.
“Jenna looks out for us,” says Myers, who would sometimes join Ortega and Stinky at a local farmer’s market on their days off in Dublin. “She’s very collaborative. She always told me if there’s anything that I was uncomfortable with, anything I didn’t like, to come to her and she’ll bring it to the table. Her being a boss was definitely for the benefit of the cast.”
Before she heads back to Nevermore Academy, Ortega will be seen in May alongside Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye in the experimental metathriller Hurry Up Tomorrow, a film companion to the Weeknd’s album of the same name about the unraveling of the musician’s pop persona. She wanted the role because of one harrowing scene in which her character breaks down wailing in a tunnel. Tesfaye and director Trey Edward Shults cited Isabelle Adjani’s grueling performance in the 1981 psychological-horror film Possession. Ortega’s interpretation was “ugly and honest,” according to Tesfaye. “Jenna channeled something so raw, she truly scared the fuck out of me,” he says, via email. Ortega adores a reference. “Any time I join a job, I love to pretend it’s necessary to watch five films,” she says, laughing. “Maybe I am poor with time management.”
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Later this year, she plays an AI hired to help a dying child in Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’ll be her first time going for a more nuanced comedic performance. “Taika balances childlike curiosity with humor,” she says. “People don’t always want to be depressed, especially not in a film about the future.” She also just returned from shooting Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist in Paris. Ortega plays an assistant to Natalie Portman, “a desperate gallerist who conspires to sell a dead body at Art Basel Miami,” according to Deadline. Portman hired a mime for the wrap party as a gift to her because Ortega spoke incessantly with cast members (including Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Sterling K. Brown) about the city’s association with the profession. “He walked around, didn’t talk to people, but I just have this incredible memory of him handing me flowers and everyone pissing themselves laughing,” she says. Ortega loved studying the way Yan ran the set. “Cathy was so unbelievably prepared,” she says. “We would keep shooting and shooting until we got exactly what she needed. Every day I got to learn something new.”
Ortega wants to direct something of her own and has written scripts that she describes as offbeat but isn’t ready to share. “I think because there’s more eyes on me than I anticipated, I’m a bit more cautious about what I want to put out,” she says. She also has ambitions to compose scores for the screen, having already learned the cello for Wednesday. “That’s one of my first questions for directors: ‘Who’s composing this?’” says Ortega, who sometimes experiments with synths and an Omnichord at night to unwind. “Everything that I’ve learned I’ve learned out of wanting to educate myself on the history of the craft that I was committing my life to.”
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As the diner fills up with lunch-goers, Stinky makes a break for a neighboring table to greet a golden retriever. Ortega chases after her and small-talks with the owners before coaxing her back with kissing noises. It’s time to return to her apartment, which she needs to declutter. “I opened up a cupboard the other day and saw an ex’s toothbrush,” Ortega says. In a few weeks, Ortega will depart for London for a mysterious J. J. Abrams movie starring Glen Powell and Samuel L. Jackson. “It all feels very top secret, but it is an original J.J. script with some fantasy elements,” says Ortega, who was able to give input on her character, including her choice of tattoos. “I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of a story like this so early on.” Ortega will need to rifle through Stinky’s passports. “She’ll be a London girl,” says Ortega. “She likes it. There’s a bunch of whippets there.”
Production Credits
- Photography by Coni Tarallo
- Styling by Jessica Willis
- Digital Tech: Pamela Grant
- Photo Assistants: Benjamin Thomson and Kinsey Ball
- Styling Assistants: Antonina Getmanova, Austin Manigo, and Jacob Norton
- Hair: Bryce Scarlett
- Makeup: Melanie Inglessis
- Manicure: Thuy Nguyen
- Tailor: Susie Kourinian
- Movement Direction: Dalel Bacre
- Production: Kindly Productions
- The Cut, Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Peoples
- The Cut, Photo Director Noelle Lacombe
- The Cut, Deputy Culture Editor Brooke Marine
- The Cut, Market Editor Emma Oleck
This story has been updated to include more information about Ortega’s performance in Hurry Up Tomorrow.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the April 7, 2025, issue of New York Magazine.
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