Top 10 Jenna Ortega Movies, Ranked

There’s a moment in The Fallout where Jenna Ortega sits in a bathroom stall, silent, while the world outside falls apart — and she does almost nothing, and it’s devastating. That kind of restraint takes real skill, and it’s been the throughline of her career ever since. At TV Hulk, we ranked these performances by how much Ortega’s specific choices drove the scene: the moments where her instincts made a character feel lived-in rather than performed, where you forgot you were watching someone act. From her earliest horror appearances to her blockbuster present, here are the ten performances worth going back for.

10. Wyrm (2019)

Suzie is a small role in a very strange movie, and that’s exactly why it belongs on this list. Wyrm is a deadpan indie sci-fi coming-of-age film set in an alternate reality where students wear neck collars until they’ve had their first romantic experience, and Ortega plays Suzie with a dry warmth that fits the film’s offbeat frequency perfectly. There’s a scene where she delivers a completely straight-faced piece of advice to the film’s awkward protagonist, and her timing is so precise it lands somewhere between funny and genuinely sweet. This one flew almost completely under the radar, but watching it now, you can see an actor who was already gravitating toward weird, interesting material over anything safe or predictable.

9. Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013)

Ortega was ten years old when she appeared in this horror sequel, playing Annie in a brief but memorable flashback sequence. It’s a supporting role, and the performance itself is modest by necessity — she doesn’t have much screen time to work with. But there’s something worth pausing on here: the moment young Annie is confronted by the investigator questioning her, and Ortega just holds still, answering quietly while the scene builds dread around her. The way she stays completely grounded rather than playing up the fear is what makes it stick — a ten-year-old keeping her composure while the horror mechanics swirl around her, never once tipping into the obvious reaction the scene seems to be asking for.

8. The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)

Phoebe Atwell arrives in this Netflix horror-comedy sequel with a kind of knowing energy that makes her immediately watchable. Ortega plays Phoebe as someone who’s seen enough weirdness to be unfazed by most of it, and that cool, slightly sardonic presence gives the character a different texture than the more reactive roles around her. There’s a sequence where Phoebe processes real, escalating chaos with the emotional register of someone mildly inconvenienced, and it gets a laugh while also quietly establishing her as the most grounded person in the room. Fans who revisit this one after Scream will recognize the horror-comedy instincts that were already fully formed here, years before they got a bigger stage.

7. Yes Day (2021)

Katie Torres is the eye-rolling, perpetually exasperated teenage daughter at the center of this Netflix family comedy, and Ortega plays her with a specificity that keeps the character from becoming a cliché. The performance lives in the small moments: a look across the dinner table, the way Katie softens almost imperceptibly when her parents actually show up for her. There’s a scene late in the film where the frustration drops and something more honest comes through, and Ortega makes that shift feel earned rather than sentimental — her shoulders loosen, her voice loses its defensive edge, and for a second Katie stops performing toughness entirely. Yes Day reached a huge audience, and that quiet physical drop is exactly why it landed.

6. Death of a Unicorn (2025)

Ridley is the kind of character who keeps getting pulled into increasingly absurd situations while remaining the only person treating any of it seriously, and that straight-faced commitment is what makes Ortega’s performance here so fun to watch. Paired with Paul Rudd in this dark comedy, she holds her own against his easy charm by playing Ridley as resolutely grounded, someone who reacts to the film’s escalating weirdness with the exasperation of a person who just wanted a normal road trip. Her comedic timing is sharp, and the real pleasure is watching her deliver completely reasonable objections to completely unreasonable situations with the flat affect of someone filling out paperwork — like the chaos around her is an administrative inconvenience rather than a supernatural crisis.

5. Miller’s Girl (2024)

Cairo Sweet walks into every room like she already knows how it ends. Ortega plays this hyper-literate, quietly manipulative student with a stillness that’s more unsettling than any outburst could be. Cairo doesn’t raise her voice, she just rearranges the air around her. The film itself received mixed reviews, but the performance is something else entirely. Watch the scene where Cairo reads her creative writing assignment aloud: Ortega holds unbroken eye contact with her teacher and goes completely still, not a fidget or a blink, and that physical composure makes the whole room (and the audience) deeply uncomfortable, which is precisely the point. Even after the scene ends, that locked gaze lingers with you in a way that’s hard to shake.

4. X (2022)

Lorraine starts X as the most cautious person on set, literally on set, since she’s the sound girl for a low-budget adult film shoot at a remote Texas farm, and Ortega plays that timidity with a careful authenticity that makes her arc hit harder. Ti West’s slow-burn slasher gives her room to develop, and she uses it. The moment where Lorraine picks up a camera and starts filming, something shifting in her expression from reluctance to something closer to fascination, is the kind of quiet character beat that gets overlooked in horror but shouldn’t be. By the time the violence arrives, you’ve watched her go through a full internal journey, and that makes her confrontation with mortality land as something affecting rather than just scary.

3. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Astrid Deetz could easily have been swallowed by nostalgia in a sequel reuniting Keaton and Ryder after 36 years, but Ortega sidesteps that entirely by playing her on a completely different frequency. Where Lydia was ethereal and melancholy, Astrid is guarded and sardonic, with a deadpan delivery that fits Burton’s heightened world without feeling like an imitation of anything that came before. That quality pays off most clearly in the scenes where Astrid is processing genuinely weird supernatural information and just… doesn’t flinch, letting the absurdity land through stillness rather than reaction. Ortega commits to Astrid as her own creation, and the result is that the sequel earns its place rather than just coasting on affection for the original.

2. Scream Franchise (2022–2023)

Tara Carpenter’s introduction in the 2022 Scream requel is one of the best franchise opening sequences in recent horror history, and Ortega makes it work by playing Tara not as a victim but as someone fighting with everything she has. The way she drags herself across the floor, uses furniture as a weapon, refuses to stop, it establishes Tara as a survivor before the title card even appears. In Scream VI, that physical stubbornness pays off even harder — watch the bodega attack, where Ortega keeps Tara’s hands shaking even while she’s swinging back, selling the terror and the fury at the same time. She gives Tara a specific emotional damage that never fully heals, and the moment Sam asks if she’s okay and Tara just laughs it off with hollow eyes tells you everything about where this character actually lives.

1. The Fallout (2021)

Vada Cavell barely speaks for long stretches of The Fallout, and that’s where Ortega does her best work. Playing a teenager processing trauma after a school shooting, she builds Vada’s interior life almost entirely through physical stillness: the way she holds her body differently around her family than around Mia, the tiny flinch at a loud noise in a crowded hallway, the moment she laughs at something that actually lands and then looks almost guilty about it. The performance is raw without being showy, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. Writer-director Megan Park gave her the space to be quiet, and Ortega filled that quiet with something that stayed with audiences long after the film’s HBO Max release. That guilty laugh, the one where Vada catches herself feeling normal for half a second, is the moment that makes this her best performance.

Jenna Ortega has built a filmography that keeps zigging when you expect it to zag: a Tim Burton blockbuster here, an A24 dark comedy there, a psychologically intense indie tucked between franchise installments. The same pattern holds on the small screen, from Harley Diaz in Stuck in the Middle to Wednesday Addams in Wednesday. What ties it all together is a genuine disinterest in the obvious choice, and her best performances are the proof.