Jenna Ortega covers the latest issue of American Vogue. Since Chloe Malle took over as Vogue’s editor-in-chief, the cover choices and cover profiles have definitely had the feel of “what can we do to make the magazine relevant to young Millennials and Gen Z?” And I feel like that demographic might be lost for Vogue, although I get why Malle is trying. All of which to say, Ortega’s editorial seems to be a hit with the younger folks, but the interview reads like Vogue trying to get blood from a stone. I’m saying that as someone who liked Ortega and thinks she’s cool, but man, she’s not a very good interview subject. Some highlights:

She prefers bare nails. “It’s so much upkeep [to have painted nails]. In my day-to-day life, I’m very practical, very comfortable. I’m a very low-maintenance person.”

Becoming a child actor: “I wanted to do it so desperately,” Ortega says. Still, she says—after a long pause—“I don’t think I would start someone that young.” She has said that she would sometimes go all day on set without eating or drinking. There should be “less of a workhorse expectation put on these kids,” she says. While she felt protected by her mother, it’s a “very susceptible environment for things to get confused.” And when Wednesday blew up in 2022, Ortega felt profoundly disoriented. Children stopped her in the street; she saw her own face on T-shirts. There was “no one really showing you the ropes.”

Her advice to would-be child actors: She would now advise a child who wanted to act to instead develop their creative horizons. As an actor, “you need things to pull from.”

Her obsessive-compulsive disorder: “There’s a lot of different trains rolling in my brain at the same time,” she tells me. Ortega was seven when she realized there was something different about the way her mind worked. She was waking up early, before her siblings, to perform a specific routine every morning before school. “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 now recognizes that behavior as an early manifestation of obsessive compulsive disorder, which continues to impact her life. Sometimes, if she’s tired or jet-lagged or anxious about an upcoming job, “I just bite the bullet and do the routine”: repeating the phrase “take care” a specific number of times throughout the day; stepping onto set with her left foot first; holding her breath and counting to 71.

She does not read reviews: She does not watch her own movies. She does not read reviews—“I think that that would send me into a psychosis of some sort”—or open the box office updates her team sends. “I don’t want it to become a numbers thing,” she says. She only encounters chatter about her movies through word of mouth or Instagram, “which I’m on less and less,” she says. “So much of what you see on there nowadays is just garbage AI.” Anyway, she says, “we all look at ourselves too much.”

She would love to slow down: “I would love to slow down a bit,” she says. But when I ask her what slowing down might entail, she describes studying abroad, learning about musical composition, or trying photography. “I do think I’m somebody who always has to be moving.”

[From Vogue]

I like how she reframes her OCD behaviors as self-soothing, like she does those repetitive actions to calm herself down. And that’s exactly what she’s doing too, reverting to familiar actions and habits to calm her nervous system. She also says that she’s working with a therapist about it. The talk about being a child actor reminds me of a lot of athletes who started training in one particular sport at a young age. That kind of singular focus from childhood warps people – it makes them very, very good at one particular thing, and they find it difficult when they have to do anything other than that one thing.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid. Cover courtesy of Vogue.