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“Wednesday” star Jenna Ortega is being condemned as “entitled” and “beyond toxic” by veteran Hollywood producer and filmmaker Steven DeKnight.
DeKnight blasted on-set antics revealed by Ortega on Dax Shepard’s podcast “Armchair Expert” — including admissions that the 20-year-old behaved in an “unprofessional” manner on the set of the Netflix show and changed lines that “did not make sense.”
Taking to Twitter, DeKnight wrote that he loves “talking with actors about their lines/stories,” but sometimes the stars “don’t have the full pictures (in TV) of where the story is going and why some lines are needed for the whole to make sense.”
Although he partly blamed her age for her actions, he also said she “should” be aware of how things work.
This kind of statement is beyond entitled and toxic. I love her work, but life’s too short to deal with people like this in the business.
— Steven DeKnight (@stevendeknight) March 7, 2023“She’s young, so maybe she doesn’t know any better (but she should),” he continued in a Twitter thread. “She should also ask herself how she would feel if the showrunners gave an interview and talked about how difficult she was and refused to perform the material.”
While he loves her work, he continued, life is “too short” to “deal with people” like her in the industry.
Debating the debacle with other Twitter users, DeKnight — who also worked on series including “Daredevil” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — called Ortega’s behavior “extremely unprofessional,” adding that, in his opinion, actors should air their concerns behind the scenes and not “trash the writing” on a public podcast.
“In this business, it’s extremely bad form to throw your collaborators under a creative bus,” he declared.
The Post has reached out to Ortega’s representatives for comment.
On 48-year-old Shepard’s podcast last week, the “Wednesday” star admitted that she put her “foot down,” verging on being “unprofessional” for the sake of her Addams Family character, of whom she was “very protective.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to put my foot down more on a set in a way that I had to on ‘Wednesday,’” she said. “Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all.”
She said her character taking part in a “love triangle” had “made no sense,” and she repeatedly told writers “No” on plot points — even at times “changing lines” herself in the script.
“There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense, where I just started changing lines,” the “Scream VI” actress continued. “The script supervisor thought I was going with something and then I had to sit down with the writers, and they’d be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ And I’d have to go and explain why I couldn’t go do certain things.”
She even went so far as to admit that she was dissatisfied most of the time with her performance.
There “was not a scene” during production where she “went home and was like, ‘OK, that should be fine,'” she confessed.
Her faltering confidence in the series belied the show’s insurmountable success: It quickly rose as the streaming giant’s second-largest English-language show of all time.
Netflix said it logged a whopping 1.02 billion hours viewed in the three weeks after its Nov. 16 debut, with more than 150 million homes watching.
The only other shows that previously crossed the 1 billion-hours mark in just 28 days were “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things 4,” the streamer added.
As Elle’s April 2023 cover star, the young performer told the magazine she was “scared” that she wouldn’t “live up to people’s expectations,” adding that receiving compliments is “unbelievable.”
But the script overhauls and constructive feedback during filming didn’t deter the show’s producers from working with her again.
Not only will Ortega play Wednesday in a second season, but she will serve as an executive producer herself.
The show’s director, Tim Burton, had nothing but shiny things to offer about his lead actress, saying Ortega had Wednesday “in her soul.”
“You have to kind of ‘be’ Wednesday, and that’s what Jenna is,” Burton told Elle. “Whether she likes it or not, she’s got that in her soul, and as a person.”
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