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Jenna Ortega talks about her love of horror and portraying ‘Wednesday’ on ‘Hot Ones’
The actress took on the hot ones challenge while revealing her approach to playing Wednesday Addams, as well as her lifelong love of horror.
Jenna Ortega finally took on the Sean Evans ‘Hot Ones’ challenge, where celebrity interviewees try to answer questions while eating 10 increasingly spicy chicken wings.
The actress went into how she approached playing Wednesday Addams in Netflix’s ‘Wednesday’, what she thinks makes a good horror movie, and when she discovered her love of scaring people.
How she approached ‘Wednesday’
The ‘Hot Ones’ interview began when Evans asked Ortega about her approach to taking on such an iconic and nostalgic character, Wednesday Addams, from the Addams Family.
“I think that fighting the nostalgia that everyone feels for the ‘60s Wednesday and the ‘90s Wednesday while feeding into that, but also giving a new take and making it your own to a new generation so that they’re introduced to the character, was a real balancing act,” she began.
“So I found that as long as I studied the old material and took traits and aspects that I knew I could easily weave into my own iteration, it felt like a good, happy medium.”
Ortega’s performance of the memorable character earned her both a 2023 Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy, and a 2023 SAG nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series.
But her first stand-out role was in 2022’s ‘Scream’, where the actress says she felt at home in the horror environment. The actress joked in a Netflix interview: “I don’t know what it is about my face but people always wanna throw blood on it.”
Exploring her love of horror
Going into her love of horror, Ortega says she’s loved scaring people since she was a child.
“I know when I was younger, when people would jump out behind walls or something like that I never moved, I never flinched, and people would tell me I had no soul,” she explained as the heat from a sauce of 101,000 Scoville units crept up on her.
“So I felt like trying to get them back was kind of the start of it all. I would say, from a very early age.”
She also spoke about her love of the 1980 slasher film ‘Prom Night’, and how she thinks it became the standard for all slasher-horror films since.
“It’s got all the classic teenage tropes, it’s got incredible gore. I feel like there’s just so many staples that it’s inspired, so many horror films that have come since then,” she said.
“It’s just a proper way to do a slasher, like if you ever needed some sort of guiding light, I think ‘Prom Night’ is a really, really great one.”
Later this week, Ortega will be hosting her first Saturday Night Live episode, joined by musical guests The 1975. The upcoming film, ‘Scream VI’, finds Ortega reprising her Tara Carpenter role, and will be released next Friday, March 10.