If this were a dream weekend night back home, Ortega says the evening would start with a long walk. “I’d want to spend some time in a park or a cemetery,” she says. “I might want to see a show at the theater, then meet some friends at a bar and have a couple of drinks. They could do dinner after, but maybe I would just go home and read.” Right now, she’s toting around Equus, the 1973 play by Peter Shaffer about a child who has religious ideations about horses. “I prefer to read plays in between jobs because they are a bit easier,” she adds.
When it comes to her own work, there’s not a character—neither Wednesday Addams nor Beetlejuice Beetlejuice‘s Astrid Deetz—that has influenced her own unique beauty look. “I’ve been on jobs where I’ve thought, Oh, I really love this lip color. But when I try to wear it afterwards, I can’t, because all I see is the character,” she tells me as our time together draws to a close. “I am in a great phase of exploration in my life right now, and I don’t want to feel married to any one thing. When you have the opportunity to play, why don’t you?”
