Jenna Ortega Almost Quit Acting Before You

At just 23 years old, Jenna Ortega has already cultivated quite the resume, flexing her penchant for horror through X, the Beetlejuice sequel, the Scream films, and, of course, her Emmy-nominated lead role in Wednesday. But as it turns out, the actor once considered stepping away from the field altogether.

During an April 8 appearance on Big Bro with Kid Cudi, the host — and Ortega’s X castmate — asked if she’d ever doubted her path as an actor.

“When I was a teenager, I’d gotten off of a children’s show, and I didn’t know what I was gonna do,” she said. (Ortega starred on Disney Channel’s Stuck in the Middle from 2016 to 2018.) “I had to prove myself and meet all these new casting directors who didn’t know who I was. And it just felt like a good time to call it quits, if I was going to.”

Ortega was also about to start high school, and said she’d had “a good run” as an actor, but then she booked the role of Ellie Alves on You Season 2.

“I went on the set, and I loved it, and had the best time,” she said. “And then I thought, Yeah, there’s no way I could let this go.”

Getting Real About The Industry

Ortega acknowledged that her desire (albeit temporary) to leave acting was “a really easy thought to have,” as “there’s so much that comes with the job that no one can really prepare you for.”

She’s been open about some of those realities in recent years. Of the time following Wednesday Season 1, for example, she told Harper’s Bazaar: “To be quite frank, after the show and trying to figure everything out, I was an unhappy person. After the pressure, the attention — as somebody who’s quite introverted, that was so intense and so scary.”

After the young actor courted controversy for her remarks about changing lines on the Wednesday set, she told Vanity Fair that she “could have used my words better.”

The aftermath felt “dystopian,” Ortega said. “I felt like a caricature of myself.” But, she went on to acknowledge: “You’re never going to please everybody, and as someone who naturally was a people pleaser, that was really hard for me to understand. Some people just may not like you… and that’s entirely fine.”