“Did I, at 14, create a Twitter account because I had to and enjoy looking at salacious edited content of myself as a child? No. It’s horrifying. It’s corrupting. It’s wrong,” she told the media.
“I used to have a Twitter account but people were like, ‘Oh, you gotta do it, you gotta create your own image.’ I ended up deleting it a couple of years ago because I was already in a mess with all the ridiculous images and photos that were coming in after the show. [and] It has been deleted.
“It was gross, it made me feel bad, it made me uncomfortable,” Ortega continued. “Anyway, that’s why I deleted it. Because I couldn’t say anything without seeing it. I just woke up one day and was like, ‘I don’t need this anymore,’ so I deleted it.”
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Read: How to combat the misuse of deepfakes?
While progress has been made in enforcing laws against non-consensual imagery and deepfakes, experts say more needs to be done. Earlier this month, the San Francisco City Attorney filed a landmark lawsuit against 16 “nudification” websites for violating U.S. laws regarding non-consensual intimate images and child abuse material.
“Naturify” sites and apps are easy to use: anyone can upload a photo of a real person and generate a fake, yet realistic, nude image, turning someone’s photo into an explicit image within seconds.
Ortega told The New York Times that he recalled receiving a message from a social media follower when he was 12 years old, “with an unsolicited photo of male genitalia attached.”
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“That was just the beginning of what was to come,” she added.
Jenna Ortega plays Wednesday Addams on Wednesday.
The star was just nine years old when she began her acting career, and her first role credited on IMDb was in an episode of the short-lived sitcom “Rob” in 2012. Her first film role came in 2013, when she landed a small role as the vice president’s daughter in “Iron Man 3.”
She admitted that she sometimes “regrets” the attention she and her parents received during her childhood, but ultimately “wouldn’t want to change anything.”
“If anything, I’m so grateful for the lessons I’ve learned in this job. It’s a job that’s familiar to me, and I feel so safe, comfortable and excited to go to work every day,” she told the outlet.
Her next project, Beetlejuice, opens at the Venice Film Festival on August 28th and hits theaters in September. Its New Zealand release date is currently set for September 5th.
The actress has been inundated with acting offers lately and currently has two other projects in the works: She recently filmed the dark comedy Death of a Unicorn alongside Paul Rudd, and has a starring role in the upcoming sci-fi film Klara and the Sun, directed by New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi.
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After initially filming in the Queenstown area in April, Ortega and a cast of extras were spotted receiving instructions from Waititi on High Street in Auckland’s CBD. Local businesses told the Herald that filming was going smoothly and with minimal disruption.
Last year, film director and TV producer Steven DeKnight slammed Ortega, then 20, on social media, calling her “arrogant” and “too toxic,” and claimed the actress had “publicly abused” producers and writers of “Wednesday,” a hit Netflix spinoff of “The Addams Family.”
DeKnight made the sensational claim on Twitter, adding: “Life is too short to deal with people like this in this industry.”
His outrage was sparked after Ortega admitted on the “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard” podcast that he had behaved “unprofessional” on set while struggling with his material on Wednesday.
However, DeKnight later softened his comments and issued an apology of sorts, tweeting: “I can’t stress this enough – she is an incredible talent. It was just an unfortunate situation where our creative differences became so public.”
“I will also admit that writers, including myself, are nervous about the looming strike. It’s the worst possible situation.”
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“She’s amazing. I’ve said that time and time again. It was an unfortunate gaffe to say that publicly. We all make those kinds of gaffes. It’s a learning experience for everyone, myself included.”
The second season of the series, which reportedly became Netflix’s second most-watched English-language show, began filming in Ireland in May.