Jenna Ortega recently told Esquire that, as a child actor, she would go entire days without asking for food or water to make sure she was not “in the way of anybody.”
“I really had it going for me as a child ‘cause I can’t think of one mistake I made,” Ortega said. “Is that a terrible thing to say? I feel like I make mistakes now all the time, but as a child, I was so grateful and so excited to be there that my game face was on.”
Part of putting on that game face, Ortega explained, was not asking for anything on set.
“I wasn’t asking for a sip of water,” she recalled. “I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”
Ortega added, “Maybe that was my mistake, was not actually looking after myself.”
Before she was “Wednesday,” Ortega got her break headlining the Disney Channel series “Stuck in the Middle.” That show debuted in 2016, and Ortega was only 13 years old. Her other early TV credits include “Richie Rich,” “Jane the Virgin,” “You” and “Elena of Avalor.”
When asked for her take on the stigmas surrounding child stars, Ortega quipped, “Is it wrong to say that a lot of them are true? And do with that what you will.” She later explained that “the motivation” behind her career was sparked very young when she first told her parents she wanted to be an actor.
“I was 7 years old when I said I wanted to do this,” Ortega said. “My parents laughed at me when I told them that I wanted to do it, and then that was kind of the root of everything. The motivation. And I never really stopped, because I’m very stubborn. And then I never questioned it.”