“There are times I regret it, there are times my parents regret it,” Jenna Ortega says of child stardom in a new interview with Le New York TimesShe acknowledges that “kids aren’t supposed to work like that” on film sets and that becoming an actress completely and utterly changed the way she grew up. However, “looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing,” she adds. “I don’t believe it because I’m incredibly grateful for the lessons it taught me.”
Ortega, who got his start on Disney Channel and Jane the Virginoffers fascinating insights into being a child celebrity. She notes that she was lucky to have her mother watch over her on set and to have parents who made sure she took school seriously. So, in some ways, she had a more positive experience than some of her peers and predecessors. But child stardom comes with its inevitable pitfalls. “Did I enjoy being 14 and creating a Twitter account because I was supposed to and seeing dirty content edited of me as a child? No. It’s terrifying. It’s corrupt. It’s wrong,” she says. She recalls being told she had to have a social media profile to build her image. But the first direct message she opened on Twitter at age 12 “was an unsolicited photo of a man’s genitals, and that was just the beginning of what was to come.”
“It was disgusting and it made me feel bad. It made me feel uncomfortable,” she said. “Anyway, that’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that. So one day I woke up and I was like, Oh, I don’t need this anymore. So I dropped it.”
Ortega has a refreshingly clear-eyed view of the strange world of Hollywood, especially when she was young. Not from a film-industry family, she became “afraid of other people” after encountering the “strange, intense personalities” of her parents, producers and various charlatans who never had her best interests at heart. “(And) it’s a hard lesson to learn at such a young age, and especially hard when you have adults or people who should know better talking to you in a way that is potentially dangerous to someone whose brain is still growing and developing,” she says.
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There are a lot of scary things about fame. “And it’s hard to say because most of the time, you can’t complain,” Ortega admits. “I wanted this when I was a kid. I live such a privileged life. I’m so lucky to do what I do. I love my job. I don’t see myself ever wanting to quit my job. There are certain things that no one can really prepare you for, and this kind of attention is one of them.” You can read the full interview here.
