Jenna Ortega does not do many long interviews, and she says so herself right at the top of her new conversation with Josh Horowitz on Happy Sad Confused. Her social battery runs low, and she worries about fading halfway through a sit-down. She did not fade. The episode, her first podcast appearance in years, arrived just ahead of her new film Klara and the Sun, which opens in theaters today, October 23, and it covers the film, the Wednesday doubts she carried through season one, the mental health habits she is honest about, and why she expects to step away from television once Wednesday is behind her.
Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend, in director Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, with Amy Adams as the mother who brings Klara home for her daughter Josie, played by Mia Tharia. After Wednesday made her famous, she said, most of what she was sent asked her to play the same moody teenager again. Ishiguro’s book was the opposite of that, and Waititi wanted a brighter, more innocent Klara than readers might expect. Working for him meant surrendering control. He would call out new directions through a megaphone in the middle of a scene and toss aside the pages she had prepared for the day, which she found terrifying at first and then freeing, because it forced her to stop overthinking every choice.
The Wednesday stories are the ones already racing around social media, and in context they are less alarming than the clips suggest. Ortega said she did not think season one was working while she was making it. Tim Burton, an executive producer and director on the series, is deeply shy, and early on he barely spoke to her directly, passing his thoughts along through colleagues. At 17 and 18, filming far from home, she read that quiet as distance and carried a lot of stress because of it. She understands now that he was giving her room to find the character, and the two are close. Netflix sent her episodes before the premiere, and she could not get through the first five minutes of one. She dislikes watching herself, and what she saw left her mortified.
When the show exploded anyway, she could not process it. Getting recognized everywhere felt unreal to her, as if the world were playing an elaborate prank, and she admitted she is still a little confused by the scale of it. Season three has since wrapped production, and she described a set that now feels like home. Winona Ryder joined the cast for the new season at Burton’s invitation, and Ortega said she only believed it was real when Ryder simply turned up in Ireland, where the show films.
The conversation’s most personal stretch came when Horowitz asked whether she is still the easygoing kid who treated casting waiting rooms like a party. She said she has become far more self-critical with age. Ortega shared that she has OCD, and that once a worry takes hold it tends to loop. A scene she wishes she had played differently can replay while she stares at the ceiling at night, and an ordinary conversation can replay in the car on the way home, with the spiral getting worse the more tired she is. Her reset is deliberately blunt. She tells herself to get over herself, and the moment she notices the spiral starting, she gets outside and goes for a walk.
Some of that pressure, she explained, traces back to the advice she grew up on as a child actor, which was to take every job because the work could disappear at any moment. She operated in that fear-based mindset for years without realizing it. Fame has added its own weight. A line from her Disney Channel media training days has never left her, that a fan meeting you is probably meeting you once, and she tries to honor that while setting better boundaries, including sometimes declining a photo when a situation does not feel safe. Encounters range from sweet to aggressive, she said, and she does what she can.
Asked about franchise meetings and what comes next, Ortega said those conversations have largely not happened, and that she trusts the work she is meant to do will find her. After Wednesday, she expects to be off television for a while. She has been bouncing from show to show since childhood and wants to leave time for new things. Season three is expected in 2027, and Netflix has not announced how long the series will run. Her film slate is already full. She has been developing Nasty, director Mary Bronstein’s gymnastics film, for about two years, with Rose Byrne playing her coach. She also has The Gallerist with Natalie Portman on the way, J.J. Abrams’ The Great Beyond with Glen Powell, and a Single White Female project with Taylor Russell that the two are still shaping in drafts.
The lighter moments are pure film nerd. Ortega chose horror on purpose early in her career, and she laid out the chain herself: Scream led to X, which led to Wednesday. To train for Nasty she has been working her way through the filmographies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise, joking that she and Cruise are neck and neck as athletes, while admitting she has never seen a Mission: Impossible movie and asking Horowitz for a proper action list. She will defend Shrek 2 as the best of its series. Her dog, who behaves more like a cat, once wore a Chucky costume for about 30 seconds before shredding the wig. And the food she cannot make sense of, no matter how anyone dresses it up, is papaya.