Jenna Ortega Knows Best

Her performance in Wednesday, and now A24's Death of a Unicorn, has positioned her as Hollywood's Gen-Z sage.

- By Phoebe Reilly

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 and 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.