Some writers make some jokes at the Wednesday Addams depicter's expense after she admitted on 'Armchair Expert' podcast that she changed the Netflix shows' scripts without telling the writers.
- May 5, 2023
AceShowbiz - Jenna Ortega becomes a butt of a joke amid the Writers Guild of America strike. A picture from the picket line features a writer mocking the "Wednesday" actress following her comment regarding the writing on the hit Netflix series.
Shared by Variety, the picture saw Brandon Cohen (Disney Channel's "Just Roll With It" and "House Party") posing with a sign during the strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. "Without writers, Jenna Ortega will have nothing to punch up!" read the sign.
Not stopping there, writer Nick Adams, whose credits include "BoJack Horseman", name-dropped the actress in a tweet. Following the 20-year-old's appearance at the Met Gala on Monday, May 1, Nick joked, "Jenna Ortega better be back from NY for her afternoon shift on the picket line." Karen Joseph Adcock, a "Yellowjackets" writer, retweeted with the comment, "Rewriting is writing! See you at the line, Jenna!"
The comments were in reference to when Jenna admitted that she changed "Wednesday" scripts without telling the writers. "When I read the entire series, I realized, 'Oh, this is for younger audiences,' " Jenna, who plays Wednesday Addams on the series, said in a March episode of Dax Shepard's "Armchair Expert" podcast. "When I first signed onto the show, I didn't have all the scripts. I thought it was going to be a lot darker. It wasn't… I didn't know what the tone was, or what the score would sound like."
"I don't think I've ever had to put my foot down more on a set in a way that I had to on 'Wednesday'," she continued. "Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all."
She added, "Her being in a love triangle? It made no sense. There was a line about a dress she has to wear for a school dance and she says, 'Oh my god I love it. Ugh, I can't believe I said that. I literally hate myself.' I had to go, 'No.' There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines. The script supervisor thought I was going with something and then I had to sit down with the writers, and they'd be like, 'Wait, what happened to the scene?' And I'd have to go and explain why I couldn't go do certain things."
In the episode, Jenna revealed that she wanted to make her character more three-dimensional. "I grew very, very protective of her," she explained. "You can't lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it's boring and nobody likes you. When you are little and say very morbid, offensive stuff, it's funny and endearing. But then you become a teenager and it's nasty and you know it. There's less of an excuse."
