Jenna Ortega has revealed the lengths she went to as a child actor to avoid being a burden for fear of derailing her fledgling career while on set.
“I was so grateful and so excited to be there that my game face was on,” the 23-year-old Wednesday actress told Esquire in its How I Got Here YouTube clip. “I wasn’t asking for a sip of water. I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”
She now allows that “not actually looking after myself” may have been a mistake. The Screen Actors Guild—American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-Aftra) has strict rules about how child actors are treated, many of them based on state law.
Ortega knew at age seven that she wanted to act, and once her parents were done laughing, they became unwavering supporters, she said. By age nine she had landed her first bit movie part, as the disabled daughter of the late Miguel Ferrer’s vice president Gil Rodriguez in Iron Man 3. Her character was missing a foot.
“I had sat on my leg all day at work, and I limped all the way to the car with smiles and tears running down my face,” she told Esquire. “I was just so happy to have been on a movie set. I refused to leave the wheelchair, because if somebody needed me, I wanted to be ready.”
The actress hinted at what it was like “growing up Disney” in a 2025 Harper’s Bazaar sit-down. At 13 she began playing Harley Diaz, the protagonist in Disney Channel’s Stuck In The Middle, the 2016-19 series about a middle child of seven kids — all too familiar terrain for Ortega, who’s in the middle of six. She also appeared as the young version of series protagonist Jane Villanueva in Jane The Virgin from 2014-2019.
She counts Richie Rich, You and Elena Of Avalor among other television credits. On the big screen she’s known for her parts in the Scream and Beetlejuice movie franchises. – New York Daily News/TNS
