Why Would a 24-Year-Old Walk Away From TV’s Biggest Hit?

“I don’t think I would start someone that young.” Jenna Ortega said it to Vogue this week. She is 24 now, on her new cover story with her shortest hair in years, talking about the Disney Channel lead she took at 12.

On Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, released the same week, she turned the Vogue line into a plan: after Wednesday, she’ll “probably be off the TV for a while.” She has had “many years doing that.” Her reason was plain. “I was bouncing from show to show as a kid, this to this, and I want to leave time for new things.” Netflix announced in September that production on Wednesday season 3 had wrapped. The timing is exact. The streamer said the shoot had “met its grave”; the show is expected back in 2027. The public exit talk started in October.

The Esquire interview she gave in August said the same thing earlier, harsher. Asked about her rookie mistakes, she didn’t name one: “I really had it going for me as a child ’cause I can’t think of one mistake I made. Is that a terrible thing to say?” What she gave instead was the picture of a kid determined never to be a burden. “I wasn’t asking for a sip of water. I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.” Vogue is the adult reading of that page. She started at 9. She told the magazine there should be “less of a workhorse expectation put on these kids.” When Wednesday’s fame hit in 2022, she added, there was “no one really showing you the ropes.” The bouncing between shows she describes on the podcast has lasted 15 years — more than half her life.

“I actually haven’t had a lot of franchise conversations. I haven’t,” she said on the podcast, twice, like she wanted it on the record. Wednesday season 1 became Netflix’s most popular English-language show of all time; she earned an Emmy nomination for it. She said the line anyway. “What I’m meant to do will come and find me,” she added, in no hurry to sign on to another long-running property.

Klara and the Sun opened in theaters today. In Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Ortega plays a relentlessly optimistic robot child — she called it “refreshing and different,” and told USA Today that Klara is “the opposite day version of Wednesday’s deadpan pessimism.” “My favorite thing about my job is stepping into different types of shoes, and seeing the world from a different perspective.” At the film’s New York screening on October 19 she wore a one-of-one dress of steel rods by Elias Matso. “It’s handmade, human-made, a lot of effort,” she told PEOPLE, “and it’s very fitting with the film.” She was selling a movie about a robot, and she dressed it in the most human-made thing on the carpet.

Her dream stage role, she told Vogue, is a minor character in Sam Shepard’s 1978 Buried Child. She is also set to star in and produce Nasty, due next year. She wants to try theatre. Her filter for whatever comes next is the sentence she gave the same interview: “I want to be in environments that are stimulating and productive, but also just telling stories that I would want to watch.” On the Buried Child part she said: “I just thought it was kind of an insane thing for her to do. It would be nice to just do this one scene, I don’t need to be at the forefront of everything.”