How Jenna Ortega’s Scream Role ‘Sealed The Deal’ For X

While some will recognize Jenna Ortega from her Disney Channel days and others from her “Jane The Virgin” stint, this actress has been hovering around the world of the macabre for years. In 2013, she had a small role in Blumhouse’s “Insidious: Chapter 2” as Annie, a young girl who could see spirits. Later that same year, she took on some child-friendly scares with the Nickolodean anthology series “Deadtime Stories.” Ortega wouldn’t get to face horrors in a central role until 2018, when she landed a role in Netflix’s hit series, “You.”

The whip-smart Ellie Alves (Ortega) entered the picture in the show’s second season and unfortunately for her, caught the attention of Penn Badgley’s Joe Goldberg. While he appears to be a mild-mannered bookseller, Joe is actually a full-fledged serial killer with a savior complex and Oretga’s Ellie makes the mistake of befriending him. “You” is more of a psychological thriller than a horror series, but as Ellie, Ortega still shares the screen with a knife-wielding killer and spends the saga desperate to escape with her life, so it’s not too far off. Ortega would later land a role in “The Babysitter: Killer Queen,” her first outing in a slasher. And finally, in 2022, she’d come for the Scream Queen crown with her “Scream’ and “X” double feature. It’s not hard to imagine why both projects pointed in her direction — Ortega has clearly perfected her horror movie scream. 

But it turns out that landing one role had nothing to do with the other.