Jenna Ortega weird film choices continue to be the best thing about her career. After playing Wednesday Addams, surviving Scream, and becoming the internet’s goth girlfriend, she has now signed on to star in Léos Carax’s next movie, Lily May B. If you don’t know who Léos Carax is, he’s the French director who made Annette, the musical where Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard had a puppet baby. Yes, a puppet baby. This is exactly the kind of unhinged cinema Jenna Ortega should be doing.
Lily May B is Carax’s seventh feature film and his follow-up to Annette, which means we can expect something visually stunning, emotionally devastating, and probably involving a musical number that makes you question your sanity. The film starts shooting in Spring 2027, giving Ortega just enough time to finish whatever other projects she’s juggling—which, based on her current schedule, is approximately everything.
Jenna Ortega weird film trajectory makes perfect sense when you think about it. She could have easily become a Disney Channel star and stayed there forever. Instead, she chose horror, chose Tim Burton, chose to play the most iconic goth teenager since Christina Ricci, and now she’s choosing a French auteur who once had Denis Lavant eat a flower in a cemetery. This is not the career of someone who wants to be safe. This is the career of someone who wants to be interesting.
Carax is known for his visual poetry and his refusal to explain himself. His films don’t have plots so much as they have movements, like symphonies or fever dreams. Annette was literally a rock opera about a comedian and an opera singer whose child is a puppet. If that’s the baseline, Lily May B could be about anything—a woman who turns into a bicycle, a love story between two clouds, a three-hour meditation on the color blue. And Jenna Ortega will be right in the middle of it, probably looking intense and slightly confused, which is her brand and I mean that as a compliment.
Jenna Ortega weird film appeal is that she never looks like she’s acting. Even in the most absurd scenarios, she grounds everything with a sincerity that makes you believe. When she stared down a killer in Scream, you believed she was scared but also kind of annoyed. When she danced as Wednesday, you believed she was genuinely enjoying the misery of everyone around her. Whatever Carax throws at her, she’ll find the human center and make it matter.
The pairing of a 22-year-old American scream queen with a 64-year-old French New Wave-adjacent visionary is the kind of unexpected collaboration that makes cinema exciting. It’s not focus-grouped. It’s not franchise-tested. It’s just two interesting people deciding to make something strange together. Jenna Ortega weird film era continues, and we’re all better off for it.
Watch for Lily May B in 2027 and witness what happens when Jenna Ortega goes full art house.
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