An action movie with Denzel Washington made Wednesday star Jenna Ortega want to become an actress. The reason was the performance of Washington’s co-star.
Jenna Ortega is known to a large audience thanks to her starring role in the Netflix hit Wednesday. The American chose her profession at a young age, as she has now explained. A very specific Denzel Washington film was responsible for this
Jenna Ortega wanted to become an actress because of Man Under Fire
In the larger Vanity Fair interview, the actress spoke about seeing the Tony Scott film Man Under Fire with Washington at the age of six. In the movie, the action star plays a bodyguard who has to protect the young daughter of a wealthy family and fails in his mission.
According to Ortega, it was above all the then 9-year-old Dakota Fanning alongside Washington that triggered the Wednesday star’s current career aspirations. Seeing the movie “changed the course of her entire existence.”
Watch another trailer for Man Under Fire here:
Her parents laughed at her for it at first, but then her mother posted a video of Ortega performing a dramatic monologue on Facebook. The clip reached a casting director and led to the future Wednesday star attending her first auditions.
After mini-roles in which she played the victim in a CSI episode, for example, she landed bigger film roles from 2013, such as in the Marvel blockbuster Iron Man 3. She then had her breakthrough in 2016 as Harley Diaz in the Disney series In the Middle and No Escape.
