At her youthful 20 years, Jenna Ortega is an actress who projects herself with amazing speed without making much effort. His precocious career began when he was 6 years old with small roles until in 2013 he appeared in Iron Man 3 and then a succession of opportunities arose: The night of the devil, Jane The Virgin, Richie Rich, Stuc in the middle, You and the famous Scream that earned him the MTV Movie Awards for “Most Scared Performance.”
But it is now that all eyes are on her, because on November 23, she will debut on Netflix as the protagonist of Merlina (Wednesday), the series that follows the life of the eldest daughter of the crazy Addams, that iconic character who In the 1990s, actress Christina Ricci catapulted to fame.
“The most difficult thing, when working on my character, was this to include different things from the 90s and from these series and how people have learned to love Merlina so much. Maintain these features, but also include new ones to push the story forward now, ”reveals Jenna in an interview with La República via Zoom.
In the series, she plays a fifteen-year-old Merlina, dark and imperturbable, who like any other teenager is rebellious with her parents: Morticia and Gomez Addams (Catherine Zeta Jones and Luis Guzmán) and who must deal with the fact of feeling excluded, ironically, in a school for the excluded.
“She goes through a lot of things emotionally during the season at school and I think we’ve been kind of pretty meticulous with why do we insert this here? That was interesting,” adds the actress born in Los Angeles, but with Mexican and Puerto Rican roots.
That meticulousness in his performance also has to do with the hand of director Tim Burton, who from the outset had the vision of presenting a dark, scathing and intelligent Merlina, very much in his own style.
Jenna has confessed that at first she felt completely ‘lost’ and ‘confused’, as Burton did not want her character to have any expression. ‘I wanted a flat surface,’ she said in an interview. What’s more, at one point, she thought that people, including Burton himself, didn’t trust her work. However, her talent to talk about her was for her and she was even able to build her character with suggestions of her own.
“Working with Tim Burton has been wonderful, he is so good, so talented, I have learned a lot from him. He always asked me questions, he wanted to know how he was, my feelings, he always put my priorities on anything, and that is not done by any director especially when they are as successful as he is. And I really appreciate that,” he says.
And as only Tim Burton could think of, the actress Christina Ricci, the first Merlina, appears in this series, although not as an adult Merlina, much less, but as a surprise character within the school of excluded: Nevermore, where her look is so opposite to the girl with the black braids, that she is barely recognizable.
Asked if she ever talked to Christian Ricci about the time she played Merlina, Jenna assures her that her character is an absolute creation, taking into account that it is not the girl of the nineties but the teenager. “I created my own character. With Christina we don’t talk about her Merlina at all and I think she was good in that way too because it’s like she did hers and I did mine and we respect each other for that too”.
This young woman with a deep gaze, like her character, brings it to her, not for pleasure Tim Burton himself has declared: “She is like a silent film actress in the sense that she is capable of transmitting things without words. And seeing that inner life and the subtleties was exciting. I can’t imagine another Merlina.”
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