Jenna Ortega feared joining the cast of Netflix’s Wednesday would end her career

Here's one you might not expect: Jenna Ortega, star of Netflix's supernatural hit Wednesday, has admitted she was terrified the show might completely tank her acting career. Yes, the very series that's become a global streaming juggernaut and made her a household name. Turns out, while the rest of us were busy binge-watching and turning her viral goth dance sequence into TikTok gold, Ortega was privately convinced she'd made a huge mistake.

Speaking to Esquire in a recent interview, Ortega confessed: "I thought my career was going to be over after that. I panicked. I had no idea. I was so confused. And then they started talking about this show and this big release that they were doing."

It's always fascinating to learn how actors view these big projects from inside the bubble. For Ortega, it didn't even feel like a major deal when cameras started rolling on Wednesday. Despite Tim Burton's name being on the call sheet (which usually screams "massive" to anyone else), Ortega genuinely thought the shoot in Romania felt like something "small and scrappy". She says the whole cast would even joke about how mad it all was, imagining no one would actually notice their Herculean efforts.

Looking back, Ortega admits: "And when we were shooting in Romania, it felt like this small little thing, which maybe was naive because Tim Burton was involved, but the cast and I used to laugh about it like, 'Wow, this is an insane shoot for it to really not be acknowledged.'"

Ortega's Wobbly Start

For those needing the background: Ortega started acting ridiculously young, making her debut on the comedy Rob back in 2012. A steady career followed, but it took Wednesday in her early twenties to really send her stratospheric. All very glamorous in hindsight, but her nerves didn't melt away after filming finished—quite the opposite. When the first series hit Netflix, Ortega says she couldn't even watch her own scenes. She managed to get through part of the first episode before suffering what she describes as a full-on mental breakdown. Apparently, she immediately rang her mate Matt to say: "It's up. Like, okay, here we go." Sounds like a relatable crisis for anyone forced to listen to their own voicemail message, let alone see themselves in ultra-high-def beamed to half the world.

Season 3: What's Next?

As for where we are now: Wednesday returned with its second season in August 2025 (how people aren't sick of the Addams family by now, I'll never quite understand). The last time we saw Wednesday, she'd just seen off the villain Isaac Night, rescued Pugsley, and embarked on a hunt for Enid Sinclair with her Uncle Fester. Season three is still filming, so there's no confirmed release date from Netflix yet.

The show's co-creator Alfred Gough told Netflix's Tudum: "Our goal for Season 3 is the same as it is for every season: to make it the best season of Wednesday we possibly can."

This next run of episodes brings back the main core—Ortega herself, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán, and Emma Myers—with a couple of seriously big new additions. Winona Ryder joins as Tabitha, and apparently Eva Green is stepping in to play Aunt Ophelia (that's Morticia's sister, for all the Addams family completists). If you're hoping for more weird relatives and a deeper dive into family secrets, you're in luck; the showrunners are promising exactly that. Miles Millar, who co-writes and exec-produces, says we'll be meeting more of the Addams clan and delving into all sorts of family skeletons (presumably the literal kind, too).

Wednesday season three began production in 2026 but no official premiere has been revealed yet.