This is where she gets emotional,’” Ortega added at the time. “There were a lot of battles like that because I felt like people didn’t always trust me when I was creating my path in terms of, ‘Okay, this is her arc. “It’s funny and great except when you’re trying to move a plot along, and Wednesday is in every scene.” “He wanted a flat surface, which I understand,” she said. In a discussion last year for Interview magazine, Ortega said it was director Tim Burton who “did not want me to have any expression or emotion at all” when she was playing Wednesday. It’s hardly the first time Ortega has opened up about fighting battles on the “Wednesday” set. But then you become a teenager and it’s nasty and you know it. When you are little and say very morbid, offensive stuff, it’s funny and endearing. “You can’t lead a story and have no emotional arc because then it’s boring and nobody likes you. “I grew very, very protective of her,” Ortega said. For Ortega, that approach wasn’t going to work for a teenager. She didn’t want to play a Wednesday who lacked growth and was constantly monotonous, morbid and droll. Ortega clearly wanted to make Wednesday more three-dimensional than how the character read on the page. The script supervisor thought I was going with something and then I had to sit down with the writers, and they’d be like, ‘Wait, what happened to the scene?’ And I’d have to go and explain why I couldn’t go do certain things.” I literally hate myself.’ I had to go, ‘No.’ There were times on that set where I even became almost unprofessional in a sense where I just started changing lines. There was a line about a dress she has to wear for a school dance and she says, ‘Oh my god I love it. Her being in a love triangle? It made no sense. “Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all. “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,'” she continued.

Stories and Scripts by Zack Love