Jenna Ortega Says ‘Wednesday’ Season 2 Will Ditch Romance and Go Darker: “We Want to Lean Into the Horror”

Jenna Ortega just gave us a major update on where her Netflix series Wednesday is heading in its second season.

The 20-year-old actress, who starred in Season 1 as the titular character, is now a producer on the show. During a conversation for Variety with Elle Fanning, Ortega shared, “It’s still coming together, but we’ve decided we want to lean into the horror more.”

Ortega then went on to share that the show will be making a major change in Season 2: “We’re ditching any romantic love interest, which is really great,” she said. “We’re going to get bolder, more dark.”

The star became a producer on the show after being very vocal about how much she disliked how her character was written in Season 1.

“It was a natural progression. With a character like Wednesday, who is so beloved, I didn’t want to get her wrong,” Ortega said.

She explained that she “tried to have as many conversations as possible with the writers” to decide what worked best for the character, saying, “In preparation for a second season, we wanted to make sure that we could start the conversations earlier. I’m just so curious: I want to see the outfits, new characters, scripts.”

Ortega’s Wednesday is a teenager who enrolls in the school where her parents first met. There, she finds herself in the midst of a mysterious killing spree and a love triangle.

After the show’s premiere last November, she received some backlash for discussing the issues she had with the show’s writing.

“Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all. Her being in a love triangle? It made no sense,” she said during an appearance on the Armchair Expert podcast in March. “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.’”

She went on to say she suspected that she acted “almost unprofessional” while on set.

Well, it looks like she got her wish — no more love interests for Wednesday!