The time has finally come: Netflix’s Wednesday is officially out and Jenna Ortega, the series lead, is, of course, celebrating by reminiscing about all things dark in her life. Case in point: performing autopsies on dead animals… just for fun. (???)
Jenna revealed the somewhat macabre tidbit about her childhood in a recent Wired autocomplete interview. “[I] used to perform autopsies on little animals when I was younger,” the actor very casually recounted on camera, describing herself as a “weirdo.”
Fret not; Jenna didn’t actually kill the animals she performed the necropsies on. Instead, she just dissected little animals — lizards, to be exact — postmortem. Jenna shared that it was usually creatures she found already dead in her backyard. (In a surprising turn of events, in the same interview, Jenna reveals she was vegan for a very long time, up until she started filming Wednesday in Romania. She is now a pescetarian, so no more dead animals in her life except for fish!)
Jenna actually elaborated on her infatuation with darker projects in a new cover story for British magazine The Face, for which she was interviewed by Olivia Rodrigo. “I think we find each other,” Jenna said. “There’s some invisible string that’s connected to serial killers, monsters, creatures, and myself. No matter where I go. I feel like it’s something that’s always been attractive to me since I was younger, something I was always into. It’s what feels right to me, and it tends to be the scripts I’m into.”
“I love things that are a bit off-putting, things when, the closer you look, really aren’t that pretty. I love things that are disturbing,” Jenna added. “Horror films are what got me out of being a scaredy cat. It’s typically the other way around, but I fell in love with the craft, the passion that goes behind it.”
“I wish people could see the other side of horror films,” the actor also remarked. “We’re laughing so hard the entire time. We shot a scene with Ghostface in the last Scream, and there was one day [when] we could not stop laughing as they were doing their monologue. It’s not so serious. It’s really hard to scare me.”
However, there are things that do scare Jenna in real life: confronting herself, abandonment, never finding real love, and, above all, losing someone close. Now that is what's truly dark.
Want more Jenna Ortega stories from Teen Vogue? Check these out:
- Jenna Ortega's Been Compared to Wednesday Addams Her “Entire Life”
- Jenna Ortega’s “Wednesday” Premiere ’Fit Is Giving “Corpse Bride”
- Jenna Ortega’s Ultra Sheer Black Dress Is Very “Wednesday” Chic