Steven DeKnight apologizes to ‘toxic’ Jenna Ortega, sorta
Hollywood veteran Steven DeKnight is soft-pedaling shocking comments he made about “Wednesday” star Jenna Ortega being “toxic” and “entitled.”
DeKnight tweeted a semi-apology to Ortega for his prior statements — on Wednesday, suitably enough — about Netflix’s 20-year-old breakout star.
“I can’t stress this enough: She’s an amazing talent,” said DeKnight, 58, who’s produced and scripted shows such as “Daredevil” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” over his multi-decade career.
“It was just an unfortunate situation to expose creative differences publicly,” he added, “and also I’ll admit that writers are on edge because of the impending strike, myself included. A perfect storm.”
The comments come after “Scream VI” star Ortega revealed on Dax Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” podcast that she changed lines in blockbuster hit Netflix series and behaved “unprofessionally” at times.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to put my foot down more on a set in a way that I had to on ‘Wednesday,’ ” Ortega declared earlier this week, the latest in a string of recent jabs at her own show.
DeKnight initially fired back by tweeting, “She’s young, so maybe she doesn’t know any better (but she should). She should also ask herself how she would feel if the showrunners gave an interview and talked about how difficult she was and refused to perform the material.”
The producer and filmmaker also said that sometimes stars “don’t have the full pictures [in TV] of where the story is going and why some lines are needed for the whole to make sense.”
The Post reached out to DeKnight and Ortega for comment.
Meanwhile, “Wednesday” is currently the second most-watched English language-based show on Netflix logging 1.02 billion hours viewed since it debuted on Nov. 16.
On 48-year-old Shepard’s podcast last week, the “Wednesday” star admitted that she put her “foot down,” verging on being “unprofessional” for the sake of her Addams’ family character, of whom she was “very protective.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had to put my foot down more on a set in a way that I had to on ‘Wednesday,’” she said. “Everything that Wednesday does, everything I had to play, did not make sense for her character at all.”
Ortega also previously revealed that filming the show caused her to cry “hysterically” due to a hectic schedule.
“It was show up to set two hours early, do that 12- to 14-hour day, then go home and then get on a Zoom and have whatever lesson that I had,” Ortega recalled.
“Or show up to my apartment, [and] my cello teacher was already waiting for me. It was just constantly going, and if you could on a weekend, if we weren’t shooting the sixth day that week, it was, ‘All right, well then, we’ll get your lessons in on that day.’
Despite her admittedly questionable behavior on set, Ortega is set to star in the series second season — as well as serve as one of the executive producers.
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