jenna ortega

Jenna Ortega and the Global Afterlife of Wednesday Addams
By a Correspondent Who Once Interviewed a Somali Pirate About Streaming Royalties

Somewhere between the first TikTok dance craze and the fourteenth UN Security Council briefing on cultural imperialism, Jenna Ortega became the inadvertent face of planetary adolescence. The 20-year-old actress—born in California to Mexican-Puerto Rican parents, raised on Disney Channel residuals and the faint hope that Hollywood might still pay rent—now carries the diplomatic baggage of a show that reached 150 million households faster than most governments can agree on lunch. Wednesday, Netflix’s pastel-goth money printer, has done for Ortega what the Spice Girls once did for “Girl Power”: turned a moody stare into a tradable commodity, except this time the merchandise ships from a fulfillment center in Shenzhen and the soundtrack is copyrighted in Luxembourg for tax purposes.

Let us zoom out, dear reader, because context is the only vaccine left against narrative whiplash. When Ortega’s Wednesday performed her now-iconic cello rendition of The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” Spotify streams of the 1981 track surged 9,500 percent in a week, sending royalty fractions trickling toward Lux Interior’s estate and, by the transitive property of global capitalism, into the pockets of a hedge fund that also holds Croatian wind farms. Somewhere in Dakar, a street vendor printed knock-off Wednesday t-shirts before the season finale even dropped; meanwhile, in Seoul, a K-pop trainee studied the choreography frame-by-frame, calculating how pallid cheekbones might play on V-Live. The world, it seems, will always find a way to monetize your teenage angst—yours just happened to be filmed in Romania with a crew that unionized halfway through production.

The ironies compound like unpaid interest. Ortega, who spent her early teens advocating for immigrant rights, now finds her likeness used by European far-right meme accounts to promote “traditional gothic values” (translation: anti-immigration, pro-skull décor). UNESCO briefly considered adding the Wednesday dance to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list, then remembered it also lists the Mediterranean diet and decided the organization had enough cognitive dissonance for one fiscal year. In Mexico City, a mural of Ortega as Wednesday appeared overnight on a primary school wall, prompting a spirited national debate about whether the Addams Family counts as Mexican folklore now that a Latina holds the lead. The Ministry of Culture issued a statement; the artist added a monocle to Pugsley and called it satire.

But the broader significance—beyond the memes, the merch, the inevitable NFT of Thing flipping the bird—lies in how neatly Ortega’s rise maps onto the 2020s’ preferred narrative: a young woman of color conquering a platform that simultaneously cannibalizes and amplifies identity. Netflix, after all, is the same company that categorizes “Strong Female Lead” next to “Late-Night Stand-Up” with the subtlety of a tax write-off. The algorithm does not care that Ortega speaks fluent Spanish; it cares that subtitles increase watch-time in non-Anglophone markets by 19 percent. Every time someone in Jakarta rewinds the fencing scene, a micro-payment migrates to a content-safety AI that will one day replace the stunt coordinator.

And yet, cynicism has its limits. Ortega herself appears to navigate the circus with the deadpan of a person who has read the fine print and still decided to sign—twice. She requested that Wednesday’s wardrobe incorporate pieces from Mexican designers, slipping cultural Easter eggs into a show that could have been generically pallid. On set, she reportedly fought for more Spanish dialogue, only to be told by a producer that “gothic trilingualism skews young in Poland.” The compromise was a single, perfectly delivered “¿Qué onda?” that launched a thousand Duolingo streaks.

So here we are: a planet simultaneously burning and binge-watching, exporting one American teenager’s scowl to every corner of the earth like carbon credits with bangs. The UN may not list Wednesday as world heritage, but try telling that to a bar in Reykjavik hosting “Goth Trivia Night” or a Nigerian TikToker syncing the dance to afrobeats. In the end, Jenna Ortega has done what diplomats spend careers attempting: gotten the entire globe to agree on something, even if that something is only the universal truth that parents, like governments, are best mocked in monochrome.

Sleep tight, humanity. The cello solo is on loop, and the merch is 30 percent off in the gift shop.