From You to Scream: Where to Watch Wednesday's Jenna Ortega (2024)

Before taking on the titular role of Netflix’s Wednesday series and captivating viewers with her take on this classic character, Jenna Ortega was showcasing her skills in a variety of genre fare from the Netflix drama You to the 2022 Scream sequel and even as a younger version of Gina Rodriguez’s Jane in Jane the Virgin. Even though one of her first starring roles was on the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle, she hasn’t let her Disney roots stop her from taking on more mature roles that truly let her talent shine.

If you love her performance in Wednesday, I highly recommend checking out some of Ortega’s other roles below.

You

In the second season of Netflix’s stalker drama You, Ortega plays Ellie Alves, a young teen eager to make a name for herself as a filmmaker and a begrudging friend of Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley). She’s the younger sister of journalist and apartment manager Delilah Alves (Carmela Zumbado), whom she lives with thanks to a strained relationship with their mother. Delilah does her best to keep Ellie safe, but after a couple close calls with a predatorial comedian, Joe decides to let his obsessive, stalkery nature take over to try and protect her. Ellie goes through a lot in the ten episodes we see her, and Ortega does a phenomenal job portraying Ellie as both the young, somewhat naive girl she is and the young adult she’s forced to become by the season’s end.

The Fallout

The Fallout is a stark look at the trauma that living through a school shooting can have on a young person. In this movie, Jenna Ortega plays Vada Cavell, a young girl who was forced to hide in a bathroom stall during an active shooter situation at her school. After the shooting, she forms a trauma-bond with a classmate she hid with, Mia (Maddie Ziegler), but when even that relationship isn’t enough to help her cope, she begins to withdraw from her family and friends even further. It’s not a lighthearted role by any means, but Ortega helps to personify a gut-wrenching feeling that a lot of us can only imagine and hope that we never have to experience.

Scream (2022)

Solidifying her role as a scream queen, Jenna Ortega plays Tara Carpenter in Scream, the fifth movie in the decades-long horror franchise. It’s hard to talk about Ortega’s performance in this movie without giving away too much of the plot, but I will say that she and Melissa Barrera, who plays Tara’s older sister Sam, are truly a force to be reckoned with. Their sisterly bond carries the film and makes it more than just another generic legacy sequel. Showing strength and fear at the same time is not an easy task, but Ortega makes Tara a powerful character despite the looming threat of the Ghostface killer. Ortega makes Tara incredibly easy to root for from the beginning, and her performance solidifies her as one of the best core characters in the franchise.

X

Jenna Ortega’s second breakout horror role of 2022 is in Ti West’s slasher movie X. X follows a group of porn stars and filmmakers as they try to make their adult film in 1970s rural Texas. Ortega plays Lorraine, the girlfriend of the film’s director who has agreed to help with technical things on the film, like sound, despite her apprehension of the film’s content. Although she comes across as a prude to the others at first, there’s a lot more to her character that we get to see glimpses of over the course of the movie. Ortega’s layered performance makes Lorraine a relatively well-rounded character (for a slasher movie) and will likely leave you wanting even more screen time with her.

All episodes of Wednesday season 1 are available to stream on Netflix now.

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Tags: AnimationHorrorScreamThe Addams Family

Brynna Arens (she/her) is a freelance writer who studies movies, TV, and pop culture through an intersectional feminist lens. She'll watch almost anything tbh, but it's…