Director of upcoming Jenna Ortega film reveals how ‘wild’ it was when she blew up from Wednesday
When an actor’s career randomly blows up, it can cause issues for the projects they’re already attached to.
Everyone behind Euphoria will surely be pleased for the stars of the show whose careers have all taken off.
But if you ask Sam Levinson whether it’d be easier to bring a third season to the screen if it wasn’t for the careers of Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, and Zendaya blowing up – he’d be lying if he said no.
This was true as well of the career of Jenna Ortega.
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Whilst Ortega has been working solidly for a good few years now, her career shot into the stratosphere with the release of Netflix’s Wednesday.
This had several knock on effects. For one, due to her hectic schedule, she was recast in the TV show Jurassic World: Chaos Theory.
The other though is that it had a significant effect on Winter Spring Summer or Fall, an upcoming romantic drama she is set to star in.
Winter Spring Summer or Fall will see her star opposite her Percy Hynes White, her Wednesday co-star.
The film sees Ortega plays Remi Aguilar, an ‘ambitious genius with a bright future’ who falls in love with Barnes Hawthorne, a ‘music-loving rebel’.
It takes place over the course of one day per season to show their love story.
Despite starring together on the film, Hynes White will not be returning for the second season of Wednesday. This has, as of so far, not been confirmed to be linked to sexual assault allegations made against him on Twitter.
Hynes White denies the allegations, and at the time of writing no formal charges have been made against him.
The director, Tiffany Paulsen, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how ‘crazy’ it was when Wednedsay blew up.
Paulsen, who also wrote the film, said that Ortega was their ‘first choice’ calling the casting a ‘dream’.
She went on to say: “Then we had the long process of working on the script, getting it to studios, trying to find financing — that road takes a while.
“By the time we’d gotten around to actually being able to shoot this movie, Wednesday was in the can and Netflix was getting ready to premiere it.
“So we had this crazy scheduling situation where, in order to get Jenna to be able to do the movie, we had to start shooting on Halloween day in October 2022.
“Then we had to shut production down for three weeks so that both her and Percy could go and do all of this Wednesday press.”
Paulsen called filming post-Wednesday as ‘pandemonium’, saying: “It was fans and frenzy, and we were in the middle of nowhere in Utah and they were finding where we were shooting.
“It was very exciting, but a very different finish from where we started the movie.”
Topics: Jenna Ortega, Netflix, Hollywood, Film and TV, Celebrity
Michael Slavin