The Internet loves to speculate about all sorts of things, but probably most of all about the personal – and especially the intimate – lives of celebrities. One of the recent obsessions of the good folks online is the actress Jenna Ortega and whether or not she’s a lesbian.
This rumor has been going around for a few years now and it seems that basically every month there is a new interview to watch or a piece of entertainment that expand on the rumors about Jenna Ortega secretly being a lesbian.
So, is there any truth to this? Has Jenna Ortega herself said anything about her sexuality and whether she is straight or a lesbian? Should you subscribe to this rumor or should you just view it as entertainment in and of itself? Let’s put what we know so far into writing below.
The entire Internet seems to be wondering – is Jenna Ortega a lesbian?
The short answer is – we don’t know. Many people claim to be certain that Jenna Ortega is indeed a lesbian, many keep writing that they have evidence or post video after video about her chemistry with other women, but the reality is that Jenna Ortega (as of writing this article) has neither said anything conclusive about her sexuality nor has been in an openly lesbian relationship.
So, if we are writing so confidently that the supposed lesbian sexuality of Jenna Ortega hasn’t been proven yet, why do so many people refuse to accept it and continue to subscribe to the rumor that she is indeed a lesbian?
A lot of it comes down to hype, of course, and we can assume that people act out their wishes rather than sincerely believing the lesbian rumors. However, there have also been quite a lot of little hints and factoids out there that continue to spark up those rumors, both in Jenna Ortega’s talks with the media and in pieces of entertainment she acts in.
Pretty much whenever you look up her name, whether in January, July, September, October, or December, there is always a new rumor or “evidence” for the rumors that Jenna Ortega is a lesbian.
At such a young age, no one had asked the question up until recently
Of course, given that Jenna Ortega started acting when she was just 10 years old back in 2012, for a few years there were no rumors about her sexuality. And thankfully so, as it wouldn’t have been age appropriate.
However, pretty much as soon as the actress hit 18, the online rumor wheels started turning. Although, it can be said that Jenna Ortega herself isn’t doing anything to extinguish the lesbian rumor fires, but on the contrary – almost new video of her we watch seems to put more kindling in the fire.
Everything seemed to change when Wednesday came out
As a star child actress, Jenna Ortega had started to expand her portfolio when he was just ten years old. Not only that, but she had some very prominent roles too, such as Harley Diaz, the lead in the Disney Channel series Stuck in the Middle (2016–2018).
Yet, it wasn’t until she starred in the hit Netflix horror comedy TV show Wednesday in November 2022 that Jenna Ortega truly rose to international fame. More than that, ever after countless millions of people watched Jenna Ortega in that show, the lesbian rumors started creeping on the internet.
Jenna Ortega and Emma Myers
The chemistry between the two leads in the show is so undeniably palpable that the Internet has been linked Jenna Ortega and her co-star Emma Myers every since the first season came out.
Even just a casual stroll through TikTok reveals countless videos of “Jenna Ortega confirming that she’s a lesbian!” or “Jenna Ortega announces she and Emma Myers are in a lesbian relationship!” when, in fact, half of those videos are clearly doctored and the other half doesn’t really “reveal” anything other the fact that the two co-leads have good chemistry together
Still, even just that is more than enough to get the fanbase excited and continuing the rumor mill.
Jenna Ortega and Gwendoline Christie
Emma Myers is far from the only person in the show’s group that the Internet has paired Jenna Ortega with. Co-star Gwendoline Christie – despite not exactly being in an age appropriate range with Jenna Ortega and is also married – has continued to find herself at the recieving end of flirts and rumors about herself and Jenna Ortega.
Jenna Ortega herself has referred to Gwendoline Christie as “her wife” and has also told her on camera “I cherish you, I apologize if it comes across disrespectful but it is the name give her – she’s my wife after all. I’m sorry, whenever I look at you, my heart begins to ache.”
In fact, Jenna Ortega has made so many similar comments about Gwendoline Christine on camera in almost every interview, podcast visit, or magazine that the fanbase has already made YouTube video collages of lengths around 20 minutes comprised of the pair talking flirtatiously with each other.
Jenna Ortega – and half the Internet – thinks young Addams is “a homosexual icon”
Another log to the fire of allegations about Jenna Ortega being a lesbian comes in the form of herself talking about Wednesday being a lesbian.
In more than one interview since the release of the first season for the show, Jenna Ortega has said that “I suppose because she’s a baddass. She’s cool, she wears good clothes but she celebrates her individuality and isn’t trying to win anyone over. That strikes me as being a really really compelling thing to witness. Can I get in on men? I believe that people want to see strong women alongside strong women.”
And Jenna Ortega isn’t the only one who sees the young Addams as a potential lesbian or queer – a lot of people have also hopped on the lesbian train.
Most of the arguments revolve around the fact that she has two potential male love interests in the first season of the show – Xavier and Tyler. Yet, neither of them appears to pique her interest very much. Wednesday very actively avoids Xavier and is only “dating” Tyler rather begrudgingly until… the plot happens and they stop dating.
In fact, Jenna Ortega has also stated in an interview with MTV News you can read here that she doesn’t think Wednesday will be dating Xavier in the second act of the show either – “Now that Tyler is off the table, I feel that she is off boys for a bit. I think she and Xavier are just making their way to a secure location. There is a potential for a really nice platonic connection, in my opinion. Because I don’t think it’s shown often enough men and women having safe platonic relationships that don’t develop into relationships and are just real, almost sibling-like relationships. It will be wonderful to see, in my opinion.”
Theories about Wednesday being bisexual and not a lesbian have also floated around thanks to a quote from episode 2 when Xavier asks her whether she’s waiting for a guy or a girl at the carnival, to which Wednesday only responds “What’s it matter to you?” instead of answering the question.
If we’re being honest, none of this is directly related to Jenna Ortega in real life and whether or not she is a lesbian, and it’s not exactly “solid evidence.” Yet, it does keep the Internet speculating.
Netflix hides “Wednesday is gay” tweets
A rather big controversy came up right after the show premiered. Thousands of fans started speculating whether the character of Wednesday herself is gay in the TV show, even though there was not lesbian kiss or anything of the sort in the first season.
Still, fans love to speculate, as is the case with any other show, film, or entertainment, and people were flooding the online space with posts and tweets about the character being a lesbian.
However, people also noticed that tweets about the topic of “Wednesday is gay” started to disappear, as if Netflix’s staff was trying to scrub the story from the Internet.
Of course, the Streisand Effect immediately kicked in, as it always does, and people became even more passionate about the topic of the character – and/or her actress – being a lesbian or not.
At the very least, a campaign about silencing trending tweets does raise the question as to why they would do that. Is it because they don’t want a plot point from the second season to get spoiled? Or because they don’t want the lesbian fanfare to become so loud that they get forced to make the character a lesbian?
Whatever the case, fans were understandably livid, with tweets and posts along the lines of:
“She’s a lesbian. Kind of like how she is also homosexual. And she is gay as hell. Are you gonna hide this? You can hide the gay but you can’t hide from it.”
Jenna Ortega as the lesbian Vada in The Fallout
Jenna Ortega’s other big role just before she starred in the Wednesday was in the film The Fallout. In this film, she plays Vada, a young girl in high school who has to rush to the school bathroom when a school shooting takes place.
There, she finds herself sheltering together with Mia – a popular girl she hadn’t really had much contact with before. After they survive the shooting, however, the two start bonding over the shared trauma and eventually become a couple.
Naturally, this is just a character in a film and doesn’t necessarily mean anything about Jenna Ortega’s own sexuality and character (other than the fact that she doesn’t mind portraying a gay character on screen).
However, whether it’s representative of Jenna Ortega’s sexuality or not, to watch her kiss and have sex with another girl in a feature film was like a fuel to the gen-Z LGBTQ online fire of fans wishing her to come out as a lesbian herself in real life.
Jenna Ortega plays a lesbian again in Miller’s Girl
Despite being rather young, Jenna Ortega has already played a lesbian in more than just one movie. In 2024 she also starred in Miller’s Girl alongside Martin Freeman and Gideon Adlon. A big part of the story in that film also revolved around the lesbian relationship between the two leads with more than just a kiss or two to spark even more lesbian rumors.
A lot of people online even admit that they didn’t go to watch the movie itself but only watch YouTube video after YouTube video of any of the many kiss scenes in the movie.
The movie itself took quite a bit of criticism for over-relying on the male gaze to portray a lesbian relationship – an approach that used to be quite common for queer and lesbian-related media and entertainment in the 90s and early 00s but that the entertainment industry supposedly didn’t subscribe to anymore as it doesn’t exactly speak of artistic quality.”
Nevertheless, we’re not here to review the quality, directing, or writing of the movie. Instead, our focus is on the fact that Jenna Ortega once again signed for a lesbian role for her career in recent years. Not that we mind, of course, but it does spark up the obvious response – “Why?”
The various interviews in magazines like Vanity Fair and Bazaar also spark lesbian rumors
Other places the online “lesbian theorists” take their hints from are in writing rather than on camera. Jenna Ortega’s many interviews for magazines, such as Vanity Fair in September 2024 or the Harper’s Bazaar in December 2023 also spun the rumor mill.
For example, in her September ’24 interview for Vanity Fair, Jenna Ortega didn’t just visit the expected topics, such as her career progression or upcoming shows and movies, but she also talked about her “sacred” bond with Beetlejuice Beeltejuice co-star Winona Ryder, which immediately turned into another piece of kindling for the lesbian rumors pyre. “After all,” read every other fan post more or less, “there should be a reason why she keeps gushing over all her female co-stars and not over her male-costars!”
On the other hand, in her December ’23 interview for the Harper’s Bazaar, Jenna Ortega talked more about her success with Wednesday and what that meant for her future, but even that was enough for many people online to read way too much into things and accept that Jenna Ortega has jumped onto the lesbian train.
Her music video and lesbian kiss with Sabrina Carpenter
Noise around Jenna Ortega’s sexuality ramped up to eleven when the music video for Sabrina Carpenter’s hit Taste dropped. While the video itself is full of all sorts of, let’s say “steamy hot girl horror fest content,” including lots of candy for the female gaze, what caught people’s attention the most is the by-now infamous kiss between Sabrina Carpenter and Jenna Ortega.
While the Taste video quite obviously done for artistic reasons and doesn’t – necessarily – reflect on the sexuality of Jenna Ortega herself (just as was the case with her character in Vada), the video did expand many of the rumors around Jenna Ortega and was taken as “evidence” by a lot of people.
The “plot” of the video mostly revolves around Jenna Ortega and Sabrina Carpenter quarreling over a man in a love triangle scenario until the two surprisingly lock lips in a kiss.
Needless to say, that kiss instantaneously dropped the entirety of the online LGBTQ community into overdrive and fans were once again arguing about Jenna Ortega’s sexuality all the way from TikTok to YouTube and Instagram.
Jenna Ortega’s support for LGBTQ rights
Jenna Ortega is a rather vocal supporter of the rights of people from various gender identities and sexual orientations. She advocates for the Geena Davis Institute (formerly, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media), which works to document the imbalances of representation in media and help fix the still-existing bias against people based on their gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age and body type.
Jenna Ortega told Teen Vogue: “At the end of the day you are who you are. You must remain loyal to yourself and cannot alter who you are in order to blend in or appease another person.”
Yet, at the same time, Jenna Ortega also advocates for Pride Over Prejudice – which is a DoSomething campaign that advocates for immigrants and refugees, as well as various other causes, such as the National Bullying Prevention Center, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Planned Parenthood, and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS.
Jenna Ortega has advocated for women’s rights and is loudly pro-immigration and anti-discrimination, telling Teen Vogue: “It’s important to embrace your culture today because there are so many different ethnicities in America. At the end of the day, you are you. You’ve got to stay true to yourself, and you can’t change yourself in order to fit in or to make someone else feel comfortable.”
All this is to say that, while many people online are hasty to add Jenna Ortega’s advocacy for gay rights to the “hints” that she is a lesbian, a much more likely read of the situation is that she is just a young progressive person who supports various progressive causes.
Jenna Ortega’s past relationships with men
While Jenna Ortega hasn’t had an open relationship, as of writing this text, she has had relationships with men. This, at the very least, should describe her with words, such as bisexual or pansexual at most, rather than just lesbian or straight.
However, the Internet being what it is, has plenty of people refusing to accept this simple logic and continue to describe her as either straight or lesbian.
As a result, many expand on their theories by claiming that Jenna Ortega hasn’t really been in relationships with this guy or that guy, but that they were just friends and the media portrayed them as more than friends.
Whether you want to subscribe to the idea that Jenna Ortega is a lesbian or not, the idea that she hasn’t “really been in a relationship with a guy before” doesn’t fly when Jenna Ortega herself has open talked about her previous heterosexual relationships, as was the case in the Armchair Expert podcast. In it, Jenna Ortega said:
“I was in a relationship for a couple, but I stopped it when things got too hectic,” she said. “And it had nothing to do with them, it was just strictly…I just couldn’t manage all the things.”
Given that, the only logical notion to sign up to would be that if Jenna Ortega isn’t straight, then she is probably bisexual or pansexual, rather than a lesbian.
Jenna Ortega is “focusing on work for now”
As much as the Internet loves to speculate about Jenna Ortega’s love life, the actress herself seems very uninterested and has said that she intends to take a break from relationships so far and focus on her work instead. In that same Armchair Expert talk, Jenna Ortega said:
“I’m not ready to be that vulnerable or trusting with someone. If there’s one thing I’m going to focus on, which is probably something I need to change, it’s going to be my work.”
Similarly, in Elle, Jenna Ortega said:
“I am so fearful of disappointing the people in my life, or even people in public. I want to live up to people’s expectations, which is something that I need to get over, but I’m also scared that, I don’t know, maybe someone will get to know me too well and realize that I’m not all that.”
So, unless something changes, it seems that the rumors about Jenna Ortega’s sexuality will remain just that for a while – rumors.
Lesbian, straight, bisexual, asexual, or anything else – we just don’t know as of right now
The reality of it all is that not only is there no way to know the sexuality of Jenna Ortega until she comes out herself, but there are many other possibilities the wider fandom hasn’t even considered. What if Jenna Ortega is simply asexual, however? That’s always a possibility for anyone and in many cases – we never find out, even if we try to watch video after video for “clues” and “evidence.”