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Wednesday star Jenna Ortega opened up during a Q&A Panel hosted by Netflix in Hollywood this Thursday. According to Variety, the actress had quite a jam-packed schedule while filming the show. Jenna had to take classes like fencing, canoeing, cello, and German. She started her fencing and cello classes a few months before filming began and continued throughout production. Jenna admitted that the cello piece "Paint It Black" was particularly grueling as it was intended to be played by two cellists.
"I did not get any sleep," she said. "I pulled my hair out. There's so many FaceTime calls that my dad answered of me hysterically crying."
Jenna put a lot of pressure on herself to learn the piece because she didn't want to let down cellists who might watch the show.
"I didn't know where my hands were even supposed to go and then I had to make two cellos come out of one cello, which was ridiculous," Ortega said.
Director and producer Tim Burton reassured Jenna, saying, "oh, don't worry, you're going to do great. It's gonna look great."
"It was show up to set two hours early, do that 12-14 hour day, then go home and then get on a Zoom and have whatever lesson that I had. Or show up to my apartment, my cello teacher was already waiting for me," she said. "It was just constantly going, and if you could on a weekend if we weren't shooting the sixth day that week, it was 'all right, well then, we'll get your lessons in on that day.'"
Not only did Jenna learn how to play the cello for Wednesday, but the star also wanted to do as many of her own stunts as she could. As filming went on, she revealed that they "started running out of time because Wednesday’s in pretty much every scene."
"They had to start using stunt doubles or occasionally cello doubles if they didn't have time to get hands, but I was very adamant about being as well prepared as possible because I wanted them to be able to use myself because that's so much more believable if you could see your face," Jenna told the audience.
On top of her very demanding schedule, Jenna revealed in December 2022 that she had contracted COVID during the filming of the iconic dance that went TikTok viral. All of her hard work paid off because Wednesday quickly became a hit, and season 2 is in the works.
