Jenna Ortega is Hollywood’s newest A-list scream queen

You’ve probably forgotten about the first horror movie you saw Jenna Ortega appear in. She played the small role of Annie at the end of the 2013 supernatural sequel Insidious: Chapter 2, filming her scenes when she was just 10 years old. A decade later, she’s one of the world’s biggest stars — a scream queen who also happens to be box office dynamite.

Ortega is now hurtling into cinemas as the new addition to the Beetlejuice cast in belated sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. In an inspired bit of casting, she’s the teenage daughter of Winona Ryder‘s character — a move that makes complete sense.

With a combination of Ortega’s very modern star power and 80s nostalgia, there’s no doubt the movie will be a hit. According to early tracking numbers reported by Deadline, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could register a global box office haul of $145m (£110m) — double the first film’s entire lifetime gross — in its opening weekend alone.

There’s no doubt that at least part of this success is down to Ortega, who has experienced a meteoric rise to the very top of Hollywood. But how did she get there?

Throughout the 2010s, Ortega made a name for herself as a child star. Her film debut actually came with a tiny role in Iron Man 3, alongside her appearance in the Insidious franchise. She then won small screen plaudits as the younger version of the title character in Jane the Virgin, as well as leading the Disney Channel sitcom Stuck in the Middle.

Read more: Jenna Ortega says coping with fame requires an adjustment (BANG Showbiz)

At the end of the decade, she made the attempt to transition to more adult roles, but found this difficult. Due to her youthful appearance, she discovered she didn’t fit anywhere. In 2022, she told Nylon there were “multiple times where I was seriously considering quitting and stopping”.

She added: “Nobody tells you this until you get there, but there’s an awkward phase in your life where you’re going through puberty and there’s a two-year span where work is just extra hard to find. I was too old for the young roles and too young for the older roles. It was really frustrating.”

That’s not to say Ortega was absent from our screens at this time, appearing in the second season of Netflix’s You and playing a school shooting survivor in acclaimed drama The Fallout. But 2022 proved to be the turning point in Ortega’s career and the beginning of her establishing herself as a bona fide scream queen.

At the beginning of the year, Ortega appeared as Tara Carpenter in the Radio Silence team’s Scream legacy sequel. She’s used smartly in that movie, appearing as the traditional first victim of Ghostface in the opening sequence, only to survive her encounter with the villain and even make it to the sequel. She lasted beyond the closing credits in that one too.

Read more: Everything we know about Scream 7 as Neve Campbell returns (Yahoo Entertainment)

Later in 2022, Ortega made a cameo in the lacklustre Foo Fighters horror Studio 666, but also excelled as the timid girlfriend of a porn director in Ti West’s 70s-set slasher X. Ortega was gaining a reputation for stealing the show as a supporting player in the horror space, so she was very much ready to take the lead.

And that’s exactly what she did in Tim Burton’s glossy Netflix series Wednesday, in which Ortega played the titular teenage oddity. The show reimagined the Addams Family for a new generation, using high school movie tropes alongside the traditional goth iconography of the characters. It was dynamite and Ortega was at the centre of it.

With her unique and highly studied portrayal of Wednesday, for which she had huge creative input and changed lines on set, she became one of the youngest ever nominees for the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series category at the Emmys.

Read more: Jenna Ortega teases Wednesday’s ‘action-packed’ second season (Cover Media)

Within three weeks of its release, Wednesday was the second most-watched English-language series in Netflix history. But more than that, it became a cultural phenomenon thanks to some TikTok-friendly scenes — including a dance that very quickly became a meme. Ortega had well and truly arrived in the A-list.

Watch: Jenna Ortega’s famous Wednesday dance scene

For the upcoming second season of Wednesday, Ortega will be an executive producer, showing just how far her star is risen since she first appeared in those final scenes at the end of Insidious 2. It has also been reported, via THR, that her decision to leave the Scream franchise in 2023 was driven by requests for a seven-figure payday befitting her current status in the business.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is taking advantage of Ortega’s power by teaming her with Ryder, who is arguably the star to whom she’s most similar. In among the positive wave of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reviews, Ortega was singled out for praise in Vulture. They wrote that she is simply “made for this”. It’s hard to disagree.

Read more: Jenna Ortega recalls unusual detail from her first time watching Beetlejuice (Manchester Evening News)

Ortega is now a Hollywood power player, with her star wattage providing both entertainment value and a financial bump to any movie willing to pay what she deems herself to be worth. And in the horror space, her star burns brighter than anywhere else. She’s a scream queen with true Hollywood power and, in the modern movie business, those stars are rarer than ever.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in UK cinemas from 6 September.