Jenna Ortega isn’t looking for a role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — because she already had one.
The Wednesday actress reflected on her tiny part in 2013’s Iron Man 3 in a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight after the interviewer stated, “I’m hoping that we can create this world where we can get Jenna Ortega into the Marvel universe.”
Too late. Replied Ortega, “I did it once.”
She continued, “It was one of the first jobs I ever did.”
But she didn’t get to speak in it. “They took all my lines out,” Ortega said. “I’m in Iron Man 3 for a quick second. I take up the frame. I have one leg, and I’m the vice president’s daughter.”
Ortega can be seen for a few seconds about an hour and a half into Iron Man 3. She doesn’t have any lines in the final cut of the film, merely serving as a visual indicator of the allegiance of her vice president grandpa (Miguel Ferrer).
The movie’s villains are proponents of Extremis, a revolutionary regenerative treatment that could help patients regrow missing limbs (and also sometimes makes them explode). The presence of Ortega’s character, who uses a wheelchair, shows that the vice president is in league with the antagonists — presumably so they can treat his granddaughter with Extremis — rather than an ally of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and James Rhodes (Don Cheadle).
Marvel
In the ET interview, Ortega’s Death of a Unicorn costar Paul Rudd lobbied on behalf of Marvel Studios, as he has played Ant-Man in five films for the studio. “Marvel is very good at kind of laying those breadcrumbs, so it might very well be that you come back,” he said. “They’re gonna create something for you! ‘Cause they should be so lucky to have Jenna Ortega in their franchise.”
But Ortega suggested that her small moment in Iron Man 3 doesn’t give her much hope for the future. “They even took my name away,” she said, seemingly referring to the fact that she’s simply credited as “Vice President’s Granddaughter” in the movie. “I count that [as my MCU appearance], and then I move on.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Ortega discussed her Scream costar Mikey Madison winning the Best Actress Oscar for Anora earlier this month. “I have been telling everyone I knew for weeks that she was going to win,” Ortega said. “I knew it from the moment I met her that Mikey was just an absolutely beautiful, profound, and just an incredibly talented person. I was really excited that our characters were best friends in Scream.”
She continued, “More than anything, it’s exciting to see good people win. And she’s absolutely incredible. To see her getting her flowers is really a dream come true. I jumped! I screamed!”