Actress Jenna Ortega has become the unwitting butt of the joke for Writers Guild strikers. Instead of targeting major networks and studios at their picket line, the strikers are going after the Wednesday star.
“Jenna Ortega better be back from NY for her afternoon shift on the picket line,” BoJack Horseman writer Nick Adams tweeted earlier this week. The Bear writer Karen Joseph Adcock added, “Rewriting is writing! See you at the line, Jenna.”
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A photo of a picket line sign reportedly held up by House Party writer Brandon Cohen has also been doing the rounds on social media, which said, “Without writers, Jenna Ortega will have nothing to punch up!”
Why is Jenna Ortega being mocked by Writers Guild strikers?
There is a reason Ortega is being scapegoated by the Writers Guild of America strike. It has to do with the interview she did on Armchair Expert earlier this year, where she commented on the writers working on her hit Netflix series Wednesday. She insinuated in the interview that she helped improve the writing on her show.
“There were times on that set where I almost became unprofessional in a sense, where I just started changing lines,” she said. “The script supervisor thought that I was like going with something and then I would have to sit down with the writers and they would be like ‘Wait, what happened to this scene?’ And I would have to go through and explain why I couldn’t do certain things.”
She added, “I don’t think I’ve ever had to put my foot down on a set in the way that I had to on Wednesday. Everything that she does, everything that I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all. Her being in a love triangle made no sense. There was a line about a dress that she has to wear for a school dance and she said ‘Oh my God, I love it .. ugh, I can’t believe I said that, I literally hate myself.’ And I had to go ‘No.’”
