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Playing the title role in Netflix’s wildly successful Wednesday has made Jenna Ortega a worldwide success, and that’s not something that she takes lightly… or, for that matter, necessarily has an easy time explaining to other people.

While Ortega is ambivalent about the fame that Wednesday has brought her, she also maintains clear affection for the role, and the character as a whole — and is also well aware of just how much Wednesday Addams would dislike being the pop culture icon she’s become. “It’s pretty funny, when you think about it,” the actress said in a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “She’s an outsider, but now she’s on these mugs, cereal boxes, and T-shirts. You’re just thinking, ‘Oh, man, she would hate this!’”

Ortega’s complicated relationship with Wednesday as a character and a job has been there since she was first approached about the project, she said, which happened when she was already intending to move away from TV and into movies.

“I was getting to this point in my career where I was doing movies and getting in the rooms,” she explained, noting that taking the role might get in the way of a burgeoning movie career. “So I kept telling everyone no. I almost didn’t want to hear what Tim [Burton, producer and director on the series] had to say, and really like it, and feel like I needed to do it — which is kind of what happened.”

After an audition with Burton via Zoom while she was filming Ti West’s 2022 horror movie X, Ortega ended up shooting a second attempt on her own time without being asked. “The next day, I was killing time in my hotel room and I found myself thinking about her — like, maybe she moves like this. And then I realized, ‘Oh, man, I think I’m stuck, because I really love this girl.’”

That love is worth remembering when Ortega has to consider what the show’s success means on a practical level for her. “I’m doing a show I’m going to be doing for years where I play a schoolgirl… but I’m also a young woman,” she said at one point in the interview. Later, she adds, “What’s so strange about a character like Wednesday is that Wednesday is an outcast and an outsider—but she’s also a pop-culture icon. So, in a strange way, I feel like I’ve become a pop actor—if that makes sense. And that’s something I never saw for myself.”

Moving forward, Ortega plans to combine future Wednesday seasons with more challenging, stranger movie work. “I’m very grateful for my audience, and I want to be able to give back to them. But I also want to do things that are creatively fulfilling to me,” she reasoned. “So it’s finding that balance of doing movies that they might be interested in and then doing movies that I’m interested in.”

Wednesday season 2 begins on Netflix August 6.

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