Veteran producer slams ‘Wednesday’ star’s podcast comments as ‘beyond entitled and toxic’

Jenna Ortega, the star of Netflix’s “The Addams Family” spin-off, “Wednesday,” was slammed by veteran Hollywood producer and filmmaker Steven DeKnight for recent comments she made on a podcast.

Appearing on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast earlier this month, Ortega, who plays the character Wednesday, revealed how much she’d changed the show’s script because she’d wanted to “protect” the character and prevent her from being portrayed in ways that didn’t make sense.

“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 like, this 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, there’s no way,’” the actress said.

“There was times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional, in a sense, where I just started changing lines. The script supervisor thought that I was going with something, and then I would have to sit down with the writers and they would be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the 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 more on a set in a way that I had to on ‘Wednesday,'” Ortega concluded.

Listen:

The remarks did not sit well with DeKnight.

In a Twitter thread posted a day after Ortega’s podcast appearance, he slammed her as “entitled and toxic” for her behavior.

To help convey his point, he asked her to imagine how she’d feel if the show’s “showrunners” had trash-talked her on a podcast.

Look:

As of mid-March, Ortega had yet to respond to DeKnight’s criticism, though he did appear to backpedal in discussions with other Twitter users.

“Again, I can’t stress this enough: She’s an amazing talent. It was just an unfortunate situation to expose creative differences publicly, and also I’ll admit that writers are on edge because of the impending strike, myself included. A perfect storm,” he tweeted Wednesday evening.

Meanwhile, DeKnight faced plenty of criticism from Ortega fans who thought he was making much ado about nothing.

“Lord, the industry is full of ‘method’ male actors who openly make life difficult for everyone and Edward Norton still has a career, but if a girl says something 5% of that it warrants a take down. Sure it is just another coincidence,” one critic wrote, inconspicuously accusing DeKnight of being sexist.

“Stop crying about it. Ur whole twitter page is filled about tweets of her. U got some weird obsession or something? She made the show 10x better with her changes so she is allowed to speak up and let people know. Not her fault the writers did a shitty job wurh some scenes,” another critic added.

View some more criticism below:

That said, DeKnight did have some supporters.

“As her career success hinges on the success of the show, she should have some input as she IS the character. However, professionalism matters. Going to press and throwing them under the bus is not a good look,” one wrote.

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