Ortega decided she wanted to become an actor—specifically, the Puerto Rican Dakota Fanning (she is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent)—at the age of six, after being captivated by Fanning’s performance in Man on Fire. The fourth of six kids growing up in a “small, tumbleweed-esque city” in the Coachella Valley, about two hours east of LA, she began petitioning her parents to let her attend auditions. They resisted—her mother, Natalie, had grown up reading tabloid horror stories about child actors—and tried to appease her with a book of monologues. This backfired: Jenna devoured the book, memorizing several of the speeches, and Natalie was so tickled by one of Jenna’s dramatic recitations that she posted a clip to her friends on Facebook.
When the video somehow caught the attention of a casting director, her parents relented, and Natalie, an emergency room nurse, began shuttling Jenna back and forth to LA for auditions several days a week. Jenna booked commercials for Colgate and McDonald’s; played a shooting victim on CSI: NY; and then, at 12, landed the lead in the Disney Channel sitcom Stuck in the Middle. “I wanted to do it so desperately,” Ortega says.
Still, she says—after a long pause—“I don’t think I would start someone that young.” She has said that she would sometimes go all day on set without eating or drinking. There should be “less of a workhorse expectation put on these kids,” she says. While she felt protected by her mother, it’s a “very susceptible environment for things to get confused.” And when Wednesday blew up in 2022, Ortega felt profoundly disoriented. Children stopped her in the street; she saw her own face on T-shirts. There was “no one really showing you the ropes.”
She would now advise a child who wanted to act to instead develop their creative horizons. As an actor, “you need things to pull from.” She is grateful that her parents insisted she play team sports as long as possible, for example, but she still had an unusual childhood. She has portrayed a high school student in several movies, but she left conventional high school at 14. Though Ortega knew almost nothing about gymnastics when she opened the script for Nasty two years ago, the project has offered her a rare opportunity to examine her own trajectory. Her character, she says, “felt like she had to perform from a very young age. There were a lot of things I could understand.”
