12 Best Jenna Ortega Films And TV Shows, Ranked

Step aside, Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci — there's a new goth starlet in town. Jenna Ortega, who began her career as a child actor, has been slowly but surely carving out a unique position for herself in the upper echelons of Hollywood. Using her dark, deadpan sense of humor and Victorian ghost child aesthetic, Ortega has a niche all to herself — one that's allowed her to occupy prime territory in some of the biggest horror film franchises and television series of the past decade. 

But like any good actor, she isn't limited to just one thing. She's made her mark on spooky movies as a young adult, but she also has credits in a variety of different genres, from Disney Channel sitcoms to more mature traditional dramas. All of this taken together has made her a name to watch as she makes her way through her 20s and beyond. An incredibly in-demand actor, Ortega has a lengthy filmography filled with solid productions, and even some outright hits. Here are the best of the best films and television series of Jenna Ortega's brief (so far, anyway) but illustrious career.

A sequel to the quirky horror comedy "The Babysitter," 2020's "The Babysitter: Killer Queen" picks up two years after the events of the first film. And there's no way of sugarcoating it: Cole Johnson (Judah Lewis) is having a rough time. After his babysitter (Samara Weaving) and her friends attempted to ritually sacrifice him as part of a deal with the Devil, Cole has been dealing with the trauma of not just that, but the fact that no one believes his story of what actually happened that night. 

Things don't get any easier when it's revealed that Melanie (Emily Alyn Lind), his best friend and the only person who doesn't seem to consider him a freak, is attempting her own demonic ritual that puts him in danger yet again. It's then that he meets Phoebe (Jenna Ortega), a girl with trauma of her own surrounding the death of her parents years earlier, an accident that she considers her fault. Together, they fight to survive the night — and if sparks happen to fly along the way, well, that's only natural. "The Babysitter: Killer Queen" didn't get the positive reviews of its predecessor, but the eccentric chemistry between Ortega and Lewis is more than enough to make it required viewing for horror comedy fanatics. 

Cast: Judah Lewis, Jenna Ortega, Samara Weaving
Director: McG
Year: 2020
Runtime: 101 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 46%

Although Jenna Ortega had been acting for years by the time "Stuck in the Middle" came out, the Disney sitcom marked her first leading role. In it, she played Harley, a young inventor smack dab in the middle of a family with seven children. In some ways, her character has a similar flair to the long-suffering titular protagonist of "Malcolm in the Middle," complete with above average intelligence and a tendency to break the fourth wall. "Stuck in the Middle" ran for three seasons on the Disney Channel, ending with Harley turning 15 and having a quinceañera. 

With a vibrant screen presence and sense of humor that set her apart from her Disney cohorts, "Stuck in the Middle" went a long way in establishing Ortega's career as she grew out of child actor roles. In a way, it was a perfect calling card, because it proved her ability to anchor a television series, while not being such a hit phenomenon for Disney that it halted her from being taken seriously in other, more mature roles.

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Ariana Greenblatt, Cerina Vincent
Showrunner: Alison Brown
Years: 2016-2018
Episode count: 57

What's with all these people taking advantage of adorable unicorns, anyway? In "Death of a Unicorn," Elliot (Paul Rudd) and his daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) accidentally hit a unicorn while on their way to a weekend getaway with Elliot's boss, Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant), and his family. When Leopold discovers that the unicorn's blood (and its horn, for that matter) possess healing capabilities, the high-powered attorney immediately sees dollar signs. Not so fast, though. If you think that this baby's family (oh sorry, we forgot to mention that it was a baby unicorn they almost killed) are going to let the people that hurt their beloved foal get away scott-free, well, you're about to learn a lot about unicorns. 

Needless to say, things get real — and real gory — pretty quickly. "Death of a Unicorn" employs a particularly unsubtle metaphor about how the wealthy elite will have no qualms whatsoever about exploiting something even as pure and beautiful as a unicorn if it'll pad their bottom line. While the satire hits like a sledgehammer, it's still a fun film, thanks largely to the main performances from Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd.

Cast: Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega, Will Poulter
Director: Alex Scharfman
Year: 2025
Runtime: 107 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 53%

Slightly hamfisted but nevertheless effective political horror, thy name is "American Carnage." This largely unseen horror comedy has a simple yet extremely timely premise: The children of undocumented immigrants to the United States are rounded up and threatened with deportation, and their only chance to stay in the country is if they sign up to take care of America's rapidly aging population. 

But when Camila (Jenna Ortega) and her fellow prisoners enter their assigned nursing home, they realize that there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. With shades of "Get Out," "American Carnage" takes a stab at satirizing the exploitation of the immigrant community in taking on much-needed jobs, while being simultaneously vilified for their mere presence. Although it's not quite as clever or elegant as "Get Out," Ortega's performance is excellent, and the film as a whole delivers on the prompt.

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Allen Maldonado, Jorge Lendeborg Jr.
Director: Diego Hallivis
Year: 2022
Runtime: 101 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 57%

Stand in awe of "You" and the sheer number of red flags that can be crammed into a single series. This Penn Badgley-led thriller has become a disturbing Netflix hit, running for five seasons on the streamer. It stars Badgley as Joe Goldberg, a charming yet wildly unstable guy who has a tendency to get way too emotionally invested in relationships, leading him to engage in behavior that is at best creepy and at worst illegal. Over the course of the show's 50 episodes, Joe dates and stalks a series of different women, each time inevitably resulting in him growing increasingly obsessive and violent.

In the second season, Jenna Ortega plays Ellie Alves, the teenage film buff sister of Delilah (Carmela Zumbado), who gets caught up in Joe's web (that never ends well). Ortega's role is very much a supporting one, but she is a wonderful contribution to the cast of this unsettling watch, with the second season of "You" widely considered to be one of the show's best.

Cast: Penn Badgley, Jenna Ortega, Carmela Zumbado
Showrunners: Greg Berlanti, Sera Gamble
Years: 2018-2025
Episode Count: 50 (episodes with Ortega: 10)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 89%

Although "Jane the Virgin" primarily takes place in the present day, following its titular protagonist (Gina Rodriguez) as she contends with accidentally being artificially inseminated despite her bona fide virgin status, it also has more than a few flashbacks to Jane's childhood. In these moments, we get a very young version of Jane played by Jenna Ortega. The role of young Jane was one of the earliest in Ortega's career, as she joined the show in 2014 at the age of 12.

She went on to play the character for 30 episodes across all five seasons, cannily bringing to life a preteen version of the show's star and giving audiences a glimpse into the childhood events that shaped her. Young Jane is sparsely peppered through the series, but the role proved to be a major stepping stone for Ortega, giving her the exposure that landed her prominent gigs on the Disney Channel and elsewhere. "Jane the Virgin" itself was a massive hit, bringing cheeky telenovelas into the mainstream for U.S. audiences and even being nominated for two Emmys. 

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Jenna Ortega, Justin Baldoni
Showrunners: Jennie Snyder Urman
Years: 2014-2019
Episode Count: 100 (episodes with Ortega: 30)
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 100%

Released two years after "Scream," where Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega took the reins as the horror franchise's modern day scream queens, "Scream VI" picks up right where the last entry left off. Sam (Barrera), Tara (Ortega), and their core group of friends are now attending university in New York City, and Tara especially is focused on trying to live a normal life. But if the lead characters of previous "Scream" films have proven anything, it's that normalcy after being targeted by Ghostface is a pipe dream.

"Scream VI" gives Ortega a lot more to do than her previous appearance, and she proves herself as one of the genre's finest final girls. It's just a shame that neither Ortega nor Barrera will appear in future "Scream" installments, following political controversy and reactive decision-making from Paramount. However, it should be noted that the reasoning for Ortega's "Scream" exit is a little more complicated than what you probably think.

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Courteney Cox
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Year: 2023
Runtime: 123 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 77%

As soon as it was announced that a "Beetlejuice" sequel was finally coming out, it was practically guaranteed that Jenna Ortega would be cast in the lead role of Lydia's (Winona Ryder) Gen Z daughter Astrid. On top of having developed a successful working relationship with Tim Burton in a prior creepy kooky project we'll be discussing later, Ortega was a perfect fit for the macabre adolescent in a film that straddles the line between the living and the dead, ushering the 1988 classic into the new millennium.

Although Astrid doesn't have a perfect relationship with her mother, resenting her career as a pop medium, the two have more in common than she realizes. This becomes clear when, after the death of Lydia's father, they return to the imposing manor house that was the site of Beetlejuice's hijinks decades earlier. There, she gets tangled up in the schemes of the dead, and it's only with the help of her mother that she can hope to avoid ending up in the afterlife prematurely. Although "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" can get messy in its occasional legacy sequel trappings, it's a more than adequate follow-up to the original.

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton
Director: Tim Burton
Year: 2024
Runtime: 105 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 75%

With the original 1996 "Scream," Gen X got their teen horror classic, so it's only fitting that the series' fifth outing released in 2022 would reinvigorate the franchise for Gen Z audiences. Jenna Ortega plays Tara, a high school student who is attacked by a new Ghostface and only survives by the skin of her teeth, spending the majority of the film in a hospital recovering. 

In the meantime, her older sister Sam (Melissa Barrera) — with whom she has a shaky relationship — returns to town determined to track down the person who tried killing her sister. She collaborates with Tara's friend group, all of whom are well-versed in the slasher genre. At the same time. she's haunted by visions of Billy Loomis, the original Ghostface, making her question her own sanity. The new version of "Scream" is a breath of fresh air, opening new doors for the franchise while paying homage to the original cast. 

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Melissa Barrera, Jack Quaid
Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
Year: 2022
Runtime: 114 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 76%

If there's an actress who was born to play Wednesday from "The Addams Family," it's Jenna Ortega. This interpretation sees Wednesday as a surly teenager sent by her parents to attend Nevermore Academy, their alma mater and home to all manner of supernatural students. Despite all of her best attempts to alienate herself, Wednesday becomes embroiled in a murder mystery and enmeshed in a friend group, . 

Between Ortega's stony performance as the titular teen and her prom dance that launched a million TikTok imitators, "Wednesday" became a smash hit, quickly earning itself a second season, which premiered in August 2025. In that follow-up season, things get even more complicated, as she grapples with the aftermath of learning that her boy-next-door crush is actually a monster (honestly, though, that seems like the furthest thing from a dealbreaker for Wednesday imaginable). 

The show's success made Ortega a household name and is even responsible for earning the performer her very first Primetime Emmy nomination, getting a nod for best lead actress in a comedy series. (We didn't realize "Wednesday" was a comedy, but hey, who are we to argue?)

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Hunter Doohan, Emma Myers
Showrunners: Alfred Gough, Miles Millar
Years: 2022-present
Episode Count: 17
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 80%

Every time there's a school shooting, we're faced with images of the students who were lost in each attack, but what we don't see is the deep and enduring psychological trauma inflicted on those who survived. "The Fallout" features a school shooting, but the majority of its runtime is devoted to the aftermath, where we see Vada (Jenna Ortega) attempting to resume a normal life, whatever that means. 

The reactions of Vada and her fellow classmates are honest and raw, from her best friend Nick (Will Ropp) consumed with his responsibility as an anti-gun violence spokesperson to the burgeoning relationship she develops with Mia (Maddie Ziegler), the girl she trauma-bonded with while hiding from the shooter in the school bathroom. An unflinching look at what it takes to grapple with the impossible and a painfully honest deep dive into survivor's guilt, disassociation, drug abuse, and PTSD, "The Fallout" is a difficult — but entirely essential — film to watch.

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Maddie Ziegler, Niles Fitch
Director: Megan Park
Year: 2021
Runtime: 96 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 90%

A callback to 1970s exploitation movies that combined scares with as much pseudo-porn as possible, director Ti West's "X" is at once an homage to the past and a clarion call for the future of the genre. It revolves around a low-rent production crew who travel to a rural farmhouse where they plan to shoot a porno film. Things get weird when the elderly couple who own the farmhouse go all slasher, presumably taking out their pent-up sexual frustrations on the cast and crew. 

Jenna Ortega plays Lorraine, the shy girlfriend of the film's director who seems like the last person on Earth to get caught up in these ultra-horny murder shenanigans. Ortega plays against type here as the most conventional character in the entire movie. "X" made a huge splash within the genre, and Ti West followed it up with two prequels, both starring the otherworldly Mia Goth: "Pearl" in 2022 (which also starred a pre-"Superman" David Corenswet) and "Maxxxine" in 2024. It works perfectly well as a standalone horror film, but as the entry point into a remarkably consistent trilogy, it transforms into something truly special.

Cast: Jenna Ortega, Mia Goth, Martin Henderson
Director: Ti West
Year: 2022
Runtime: 105 min
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 94%