Jenna Ortega would “go all day” without eating or drinking as a child star.
The actress explained to Esquire in a new interview, published Wednesday, that she was so “grateful and excited” to be on set that she put her “game face on” at all times.
“I wasn’t asking for a sip of water,” the “Wednesday” star, 23, recalled. “I would go all day without eating, drinking, whatever, because I wanted so badly to not be in the way of anybody.”
She confessed that “not looking after [her]self” was a “mistake.”
Otherwise, the Golden Globe nominee couldn’t “think of one mistake [she] made,” asking, “Is that a terrible thing to say?”
Ortega clarified that she “make[s] mistakes now all the time.”
The former Disney Channel star was 7 when she realized she wanted to act, telling the outlet that her parents “laughed” at the idea — which became her motivation.
“I never really stopped, because I’m very stubborn,” she explained. “And then I never questioned it.”
The Emmy nominee dubbed Dakota Fanning her child star role model since she embodied so much “wisdom, like she had lived and walked this planet many times before.”
Ortega’s first role was in the sitcom “Rob” in 2012 when she was 9.
The following year, she had roles in “Insidious: Chapter 2” and “Iron Man 3” — and a recurring part in “Jane the Virgin” between 2014 and 2019.
Additionally, Ortega played Harley Diaz on “Stuck in the Middle” from 2016 to 2018.
Her more recent projects include “You,” “Scream” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
She nearly quit acting before those more mature roles, telling Kid Cudi on his “Big Bro” podcast in April that she was intimidated by having to “prove [her]self and meet all these new casting directors who didn’t know who [she] was.”
Ortega remembered, “It just felt like a good time to call it quits if I was going to. I was starting high school, and, ‘it was a good run’ sort of thing. We had talked about it for a few months with my team.”
However, after “You,” she decided, “Yeah, there’s no way I could let this go.”
She is set to star in “Klara and the Sun,” out in October, and Season 3 of Ortega’s award-winning Netflix series, “Wednesday,” premieres next year.
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