No one is denying that Jenna Ortega is one of the fastest and brightest rising stars in Hollywood right now, thanks to a killer couple of years for the 20-year-old actress that includes headlining Netflix’s smash-hit TV series Wednesday. As her role as the gothic teen heroine attests to, Ortega is specifically a current leading light in the horror genre, after multiple appearances in scary movies. Not least 2022’s Scream legacy sequel and its follow-up Scream VI, which is in cinemas now.
It’s surprising, then, that while everyone else might already see her this way, Ortega herself doesn’t think she’s managed to earn the hallowed honorific of “scream queen” just yet. While speaking to Dead Meat to promote Paramount slasher six-quel, the actress was presented with a list of her horror projects — which includes The Babysitter: Killer Queen, X, and Studio 666 — and asked for her opinion on the “scream queen” title. Here’s what the humble star had to say about it:
“I feel like ‘scream queen’ is an honor I’m not ready to take yet. I feel like you need to do a lot, or you need to do something that really solidifies that place and name for you. I don’t know if I’ve worked my way towards that yet.”
As that answer suggests, Ortega is a card-carrying horror fanatic, hence why she holds the scream queen title in such high regard. In fact, she went on to wax lyrical about how much this genre means to her as both a viewer and as a performer:
“I think that the genre, I don’t know, I just love blood and guts and screaming and crying and I think there’s something very cathartic and therapeutic about the process. I think that horror films have so many different facets and I feel like it really challenges you as an actor in order to kind of create an accurate through-line and make the romance level of the project make sense, leading into the comedy and leading into the horror…”
Hilariously, Ortega would’ve continued to say more about her love of horror, but the interview was crashed by Scream co-star Jason Savoy Brown.
Ortega raises some intriguing points about what constitutes an official scream queen. Despite the handful of horror movies under her belt, she hasn’t been the central star of any of them, so that may be a potential roadblock to her rightfully claiming the title. Still, her many fans out there would likely not complain if Ortega was happy to take the scream queen crown.
Scream VI is in theaters everywhere as of Friday, March 10.