Wednesday, August 12, 2026
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It's damn near impossible that Jenna Ortega is only twenty-three years old. The actress has a juggernaut streaming show (Wednesday), horror bona fides (Scream), and cosigns from too many auteurs to count (Tim Burton, Taika Waititi). Along the way, she learned more hard lessons than most actors do in a lifetime. Ortega told Anthony Breznican how she's handling it all below. —Brady Langmann, senior entertainment editor
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At twenty-three, Ortega already has a resume a mile long. A sci-fi gamble could vault her to another level entirely.
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The twenty-three-year-old Wednesday star is sitting in that warm summer light after a long day of shooting season 3 of the macabre Netflix juggernaut. Right now, over Zoom, she looks like Wednesday even away from the set, wrapped in a coal-colored sweater with her naturally dark-brown hair dyed even darker. She’s been working in Dublin on the new episodes since February, enduring disagreeable Irish weather. On this day in late June, however, the sun rules supreme, so Ortega uses the opportunity to put a little space between her and her grim alter ego.
People often ask Ortega if she shares much in common with Wednesday, the brilliant but dark-hearted daughter of the Addams family she began playing on the show in 2022. The answer: sometimes. “We mesh pretty well,” Ortega tells me. “But while I’m in production, going over scripts over and over again, and I’m there all day, every day, and in every scene . . . yeah, there’s times where I think like her. Maybe she peeks out a bit more, here and there.”
There’s probably a fair amount of Wednesday inside all of us, which is one reason the series has become such an immense global phenomenon, vaulting Ortega onto the A-list of actors from her generation.
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There is a universal agony so tediously mundane yet excruciatingly painful that it makes even this lapsed Catholic beg the Lord to please, please, please, let me fall asleep.
This sleeplessness, in which I don’t so much inhabit my body as watch it roll around from a metaphysical place far beyond me, is not a one-night thing. It started in January. And it’s always the same. In the darkness of my Philadelphia bedroom, I wrap myself in the baby-blue comforter at 10:00 p.m., adjust my memory-foam pillow just so, turn on my side, close my eyes, and seek the mythical seven to nine hours recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. My alarm is set for 6:00 a.m., at which time I will arise, sluggish, rush a shower, skip breakfast, and prepare for the roughly two-hour commute to the office for the job I started ten months ago—which feels a long way off just now.
I can’t be the only one, and I’m not—fewer and fewer Americans report sleeping well. Researchers from the journal Healthcare called sleep deprivation a problem back in 2019. The Sleep Science journal threw around serious words like epidemic that same year. In 2025, researchers from Proceedings B in London stated that our sleep duration and quality are actually better than ever, but our circadian rhythm is all jacked up, and that’s the real problem. For me, and maybe for you, some great something has to change. In an overabundant technological age of hacks, breakthroughs, devices, and specialists, where does one even begin?
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In his fifties Pitt starred in eleven movies, produced seventeen, and won an Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actor in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood. He’s attacking his sixties hard too. Just now he’s coming off two and a half years of continuous work, the longest stretch of his career. There was the release of the blockbuster F1, including an extended international press tour. Then he shot, in succession, Heart of the Beast, an intense man-and-his-dog story coming out this fall, in New Zealand; a new film written by Quentin Tarantino and directed by David Fincher, in which Pitt picks up his Oscar—winning role as Hollywood stuntman Cliff Booth; and, finishing just a few weeks ago, The Riders, a dark thriller set to come out next year.
We pull down the little Perriers pretty quick, and I point out that he offered me wine earlier. At an awards ceremony in 2020, he thanked his friend Bradley Cooper for helping him get sober and talked more deeply about his sobriety on Dax Shepard’s podcast, Armchair Expert, last June. I ask him if the wine is something for guests?
“No, I got—I was sober for seven years. And then I got back off the wagon.” Little laugh. He raises his famous opposing-diacritic eyebrows and holds a finger up: “In a more restrained manner. I got overconfident a couple times, went, Yep, nope, not good for me. Not in big quantities.”
“You can have a glass of wine.”
“Yeah. Well . . . I can have a few. But I can’t have a lot. I have to be professional about it.” He likes mornings now anyway, and you can miss a lovely morning when you drink too much the night before, and it’s just not as interesting.
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