Acting gives Wednesday actor Jenna Ortega a place where she can focus on the moment, even as familiar rituals continue to shape her daily life. In a recent interview, the actress spoke about her struggles with OCD.
Jenna Ortega has lived with OCD since she was 7
Jenna Ortega has dealt with obsessive-compulsive disorder since childhood. Ortega remembers waking before her siblings to complete a carefully ordered routine before school. She needed to arrange her bedsheet and open a drawer in a particular way, then brush her hair in a “slow-paced way.” Looking back, she described her childhood mind as having “a lot of different trains rolling” through it simultaneously.
Those patterns have not disappeared with age. Ortega, now 24, told Vogue while talking about her upcoming film, Klara and the Sun, that she still repeats the phrase “take care” a set number of times during the day. Before entering a set, she puts her left foot forward first, then holds her breath while counting to 71.
The rituals can feel difficult to resist when symptoms surface. “I just bite the bullet and do the routine,” Ortega said, explaining how she responds when the urge takes hold. She has seen a therapist and tried medication, but she has also found a way to ease some of the pressure by imagining OCD as a game.
For Ortega, stepping onto a film set can offer a break from the mental noise. Acting demands her attention in real time, leaving little room to get caught up in anything else. As she explained to Vogue, “You have to breathe.”
Ortega had opened up about living with OCD in an August 2025 interview with Vogue, calling the condition “pretty intense.” She described years of rituals that shaped even the most ordinary parts of her day.
For seven years, she followed a strict sequence while showering and getting dressed, including counting under the water and putting on her clothes in a particular order. She said that if she was “having a bad day” and she didn’t know why, it was “because I put the wrong sock on the wrong foot.”
