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Jenna Ortega has admitted that her Disney Channel media training gave her a warped sense of her personal boundaries – and she’s had to work hard to improve them.
The 24-year-old former child star told the Happy Sad Confused podcast: “When I was young, and I was on Disney Channel, they took us to media training, right?”
“And they told us, you know, ‘Every time someone meets you, it’s probably the only time they’re ever going to interact with you, like that’s a very special moment in their lives. So just be aware of that.’”
“No pressure!” the Wednesday star joked.
“That has never left me,” Ortega said. “And sometimes I try to give myself grace, and I’m trying to have better boundaries.”
Ortega explained how she now thinks about her interactions with fans, saying that she assesses the situation on a case-by-case basis.
“So maybe if I feel like it’s not so safe of a situation or maybe I don’t want to stop and agree to take a photo with a random grown man,” Ortega said. “Kids and things like that, of course. It is a lot though. And, again, it’s sweet. Some of the interactions are so sweet, and then some of them are a little bit more embarrassing or aggressive or mean. And it’s hard to know what the balance is. But you just… I do what I can.”
Ortega has been open about her experience of being a child star, and revealed in August that she did not feel comfortable asking for anything – including food or water – on set, because she didn’t want to be seen as ungrateful for the role.
“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,” she told Esquire.
Ortega added: “Maybe that was my mistake, was not actually looking after myself.”
Asked for her opinion on the negative stereotypes about child stars, the actor replied: “Is it wrong to say that a lot of them are true? And do with that what you will.”
In another interview this week, she spoke about her experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she was diagnosed with aged 7 when she had just begun her acting career.
“I had to open the bedsheet a certain way, and open the drawer one way, and brush my hair in a slow-paced way,” she told Vogue, explaining that she uses therapy, medication, and acting to cope.
Aged 13, Ortega had a starring role as Harley Diaz on the Disney Channel sitcom Stuck in the Middle. She also voiced the character Princess Isabel on Disney’s animated series Elena of Avalor.
More recently, Ortega is known for playing the titular character in the Netflix series Wednesday, a spin-off of the supernatural 1991 movie The Addams Family.
Her other work has included the Scream franchise and playing Astrid Deetz, the daughter of Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice.
Her latest movie is playing the artificial friend Klara in the film adaptation of the best-selling book Klara and the Sun.
