Jenna Ortega for Vanity Fair - Sept 2024

August 14, 2024

The fourth of six children born to Natalie, an ER nurse, and Edward, a former sheriff who works at the California district attorney’s office, Ortega grew up in a close-knit desert community of fellow Mexican families. (Natalie is also of Puerto Rican descent.) Tumbleweeds rolled outside her brother’s football games, “and we would run off into the night with black lights looking for scorpions,” she remembers. “One time, we caught a baby rattlesnake in a Gatorade bottle.” Ortega didn’t realize until later that Coachella—or simply “the festival,” as she calls it—was world-renowned, as if it were normal to watch Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg with your dad in your veritable backyard.

From a young age Ortega thirsted for more. “I’m so appreciative of my six-year-old self who wanted to be a president and an astronaut…because I realize now that I was always looking for a way out.” Around the same time, baby Ortega watched Man on Fire, starring Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning. It may as well be her Casablanca. The 2004 thriller “changed the entire course of my existence,” she says with stone-cold earnestness. Watching nine-year-old Fanning’s precocious performance, Ortega decided she wanted to be an actor. Her parents laughed—then her mom posted a video of her performing a dramatic monologue on Facebook, which a family friend passed on to a casting director. Soon Natalie was driving Ortega six hours round trip to LA for auditions. “I don’t know how she’s still standing,” Ortega effuses.

Interview: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/jenna-ortega-cover-interview