‘Wednesday’ star Jenna Ortega’s rude comments should kill her career — but they won’t

Wednesday star Jenna Ortega’s rude comments should kill her career — but they won’t, writes New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski.

Jenna Ortega in the hit Netflix show Wednesday. Picture: Netflix

What makes Jenna Ortega think she can publicly trash her employer and get away with it?

Everybody and everything — that’s what.

Such is the punishment-free, cowering-in-terror, you-do-you, be-well world we live in.

The 20-year-old star of Netflix’s massive hit Wednesday — already a national treasure in her own mind — recently said on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that her behaviour at work was “unprofessional.”

Jenna Ortega in the hit Netflix show Wednesday. Picture: Netflix

But Ms Ortega wasn’t on a teary-eyed apology tour atoning for her sins. No, she was extolling her rotten behaviour as a virtue.

On the podcast, the actress — who’s also in Scream VI — discussed how, like an authoritarian dictator, she was a self-appointed script doctor on Wednesday and that she deserves the utmost thanks from the actual paid, unionised writers for bettering their thoughtless schlock.

“There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines,” Ms Ortega said, proudly citing the sort of actions that would get anybody else in any other profession fired.

“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.”

Jenna Ortega stars in ‘Wednesday’ on Netflix. Picture: Netflix

Some of those things: “[Wednesday] 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.’”

Jenna, you’re in a mediocre spin-off of The Addams Family that’s best known for a flailing-arms dance on TikTok. Nothing about it makes sense.

When the writers are saying to you, “Wait, what happened to the scene?,” you have crossed an obvious line and are no longer doing your job.

Ortega’s egotistical nonsense is a throwback to Katherine Heigl’s petulance in the early days of Grey’s Anatomy.

The then-29-year-old starlet was already known for being difficult when, in 2008, she very publicly took herself out of Emmy Awards contention.

‘Wednesday’ was a huge hit on Netflix. Picture: Netflix

“I did not feel that I was given the material this season to warrant an Emmy nomination … In addition, I did not want to potentially take away an opportunity from an actress who was given such materials,” she told the LA Times.

AKA, I’m amazing, everybody else around me sucks.

Heigl decided to leave the show in 2010, and her career has, rightfully, been on the fritz ever since.

In 2015 she played a character named Mona Champagne in the film Home Sweet Hell that I’ve just learned exists. And who could forget the more recent The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature, or Firefly Lane? (Answer: just about everyone.)

All-powerful Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes shed no tears.

While doing press for her hit Scandal four years later, Ms Rhimes told the Hollywood Reporter, “There are no Heigls in this situation,” adding, “I don’t put up with bulls**t or nasty people. I don’t have time for it.”

Ortega as Wednesday Addams. Picture: Netflix

Bravo to Ms Shonda for not suffering any fools or divas, but many in the industry seem only too happy to put up with Ms Ortega.

She’s still on the rise, with at least four movies in the works.

Insanely, the actress has been made an executive producer on the second season of Wednesday.

It’s like if your boss discovered you sitting in her office chair shouting orders at your peers and said, “You’re absolutely right. You’re in charge now!”

Steven DeKnight, a producer whose credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer and who isn’t working on Wednesday, did, however, have the guts to call out Ms Ortega — sort of.

On Twitter, he declared her comments “entitled” and “toxic,” but then had to walk it back after an outcry from fans.

Ms Ortega is “fantastic” and the whole uproar is a “learning experience for everyone” Mr DeKnight later tweeted as a mea culpa.

Diva behaviour isn’t new in Hollywood, or Broadway, or opera, but it used to amount to the artistically rooted outbursts of supernaturally talented people who had been in the business for decades.

Singer Maria Callas’ temper was legendary. Network star Faye Dunaway was angrily hurling objects at crew members of the play Tea at Five as little as four years ago (she got canned). Patti LuPone would go off at cellphones, lack-of-masks and Andrew Lloyd Webber with the ferocity of Evita.

But to publicly proclaim that your co-workers stink is tantamount to treason — especially when said co-workers are responsible for the breakout role that saved you from video game voiceovers.

Ms Ortega should be criticised for her ungrateful comments — instead she’s being celebrated.

That’s how we do things in consequences-free, lunatics-running-the-asylum 2023.

Johnny Oleksinski is the New York Post’s entertainment critic.

This story was published by the New York Post and reproduced with permission.