JENNA ORTEGA Is Not Asking for PERMISSION

WEDNESDAY made her a GLOBAL PHENOMENON. But she's DETERMINED not to be CONSTRAINED by it.

- Story by CARINA CHOCANO Photographs by WILLY VANDERPERRE Styling by PAUL SINCLAIRE

Top and dress, McQUEEN.

Had it been up to Jenna Ortega, she would have spent the summer after Wednesday's debut season chilling on an Icelandic farm—learning to fish, making dinner, helping care for the spring lambs. She hatched this pastoral escape plan online, on a rural work-exchange site, soon after the show became a global hit in late 2022. "I was so stunned that I didn't really process it," Ortega says of her overnight megafame. "I still haven't." She'd been acting for a decade, but this was a new level. It was so overwhelming, it felt like it was happening to someone else and so unnatural that it was something human beings weren't designed to go through. "We used to live in villages and meet maybe 300 people in our lifetimes, and now we can travel all over the world and meet way too many people, and way too many people can be familiar with you." She tried different things to reduce her exposure. She bought a flip phone. ("I had a really hard time with social media," she says. "It was really turning me off.") She booked the farm stay and planned to travel on her own after that. But then Tim Burton asked her to do Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and she spent the summer shooting in London instead.

Ortega is telling me this over iced teas on the patio of a popular cafe in the Los Feliz neighborhood of L.A., where we're meeting an hour later than planned. Earlier, she'd been trying to humanely evict a wasp's nest from her balcony and locked herself out of her apartment in the process. A friend came over with spare keys, but they were the wrong ones—so she shimmied down a nearby palm tree to freedom. (“Mercury retrograde,” she says. She doesn't believe in it, but she also concedes that it explains a lot.)

Ortega is in town to promote Alex Scharfman’s horror comedy