{"id":392276,"date":"2026-04-10T22:06:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T22:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/392276\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T22:06:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T22:06:07","slug":"jenna-ortega-could-have-been-the-creepy-kid-in-hereditary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/392276\/","title":{"rendered":"Jenna Ortega could have been the creepy kid in Hereditary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everybody enjoys a good Hollywood counterfactual. What if Clive Owen had accepted Marvel\u2019s initial offer to play Iron Man<\/a>? What if\u00a0Back To The Future\u2018s producers hadn\u2019t given up on Eric Stoltz? And now, to add another one to the list: What if Jenna Ortega had won the role as the creepy kid in 2018 horror hit\u00a0Hereditary<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Ortega\u00a0revealed this oddball possibility (per\u00a0People<\/a>) during an interview on podcast Big Bro With Kid Cudi\u00a0this week, stating that, even at a relatively young age, she could sense the film was \u201cimportant.\u201d Talking to Cudi, Ortega noted that, \u201cSome things I just think, \u2018Okay, well whatever suits the project best.\u2019 I do remember\u2014I didn\u2019t understand it, when I came in\u2014but I think I auditioned for Hereditary, which obviously [I] wouldn\u2019t have made any sense for, especially my disposition as a kid.\u201d (Although she\u2019d appeared in an\u00a0Insidious\u00a0movie a few years previous, Ortega was still pretty firmly in her Disney Channel period when Ari Aster\u2019s horror hit began filming in 2017.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Wednesday\u00a0star didn\u2019t specify what role she believes she auditioned for in the film, but\u00a0Hereditary\u00a0isn\u2019t exactly brimming with characters; the easy assumption is that she was in the running for Charlie, the young girl played memorably by Milly Shapiro. (Which makes Ortega\u2019s other comments that the dialogue she was given to audition with \u201ckind of went over the head\u201d grimly appropriate, for those familiar with how things turn out for that particular character.) Ortega said things only really clicked for her after sitting down to actually watch the movie, saying, \u201cI remember seeing it, looking at it and thinking, \u2018I feel like this is an important movie.\u2019 And then it was, and it came out and we went to theater and I sat up in my chair and I looked at my mom and I said ,\u2019This is one that I said was gonna be [important].\u2019 We didn\u2019t even realize, but [it\u2019s an] incredible movie.\u201d (She also doubles down on the assertion that she \u201cjust didn\u2019t make\u201d sense for the movie, which we can\u2019t really discount; despite not actually being in the movie for all that long because, y\u2019know, Shapiro\u2019s un-self-conscious performance is a hugely memorable part of how\u00a0Hereditary\u00a0establishes its tone, and seeing that filtered through a different performer is genuinely difficult to imagine.)\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everybody enjoys a good Hollywood counterfactual. What if Clive Owen had accepted Marvel\u2019s initial offer to play Iron…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-392276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}