Everybody enjoys a good Hollywood counterfactual. What if Clive Owen had accepted Marvel’s initial offer to play Iron Man? What if Back To The Future‘s producers hadn’t 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 Hereditary?
Ortega revealed this oddball possibility (per People) during an interview on podcast Big Bro With Kid Cudi this week, stating that, even at a relatively young age, she could sense the film was “important.” Talking to Cudi, Ortega noted that, “Some things I just think, ‘Okay, well whatever suits the project best.’ I do remember—I didn’t understand it, when I came in—but I think I auditioned for Hereditary, which obviously [I] wouldn’t have made any sense for, especially my disposition as a kid.” (Although she’d appeared in an Insidious movie a few years previous, Ortega was still pretty firmly in her Disney Channel period when Ari Aster’s horror hit began filming in 2017.)
The Wednesday star didn’t specify what role she believes she auditioned for in the film, but Hereditary isn’t 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’s other comments that the dialogue she was given to audition with “kind of went over the head” 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, “I remember seeing it, looking at it and thinking, ‘I feel like this is an important movie.’ 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 ,’This is one that I said was gonna be [important].’ We didn’t even realize, but [it’s an] incredible movie.” (She also doubles down on the assertion that she “just didn’t make” sense for the movie, which we can’t really discount; despite not actually being in the movie for all that long because, y’know, Shapiro’s un-self-conscious performance is a hugely memorable part of how Hereditary establishes its tone, and seeing that filtered through a different performer is genuinely difficult to imagine.)
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