In the hit Netflix show "Wednesday," Jenna Ortega has given us one of the most memorable wacky dance scenes since Elaine busted her moves out on "Seinfeld" in the 1990s.
And it turns out that Ortega made it all up! She didn't even use a choreographer, as she explained to Jimmy Fallon on "The Tonight Show" Friday.
"I have no experience in that field (dancing)," she said, revealing that director Tim Burton was relying on her to come up with the moves on her own. "I didn't sleep for two days."
In the key scene from "Wednesday," Ortega (who plays the title character, the dour, macabre daughter from "The Addams Family") has agreed to go to a big school dance with a date. Then the Cramps' "Goo Goo Muck" from 1981 comes on the speakers, and she can't control herself.
Well, sort of. She dances, but in a totally Wednesday way, with herky-jerky controlled moves that spurred a viral sensation (and a little controversy, but more on that in a moment).
How did that all come together? "Wednesday" is one of Netflix's biggest hits ever, and Burton is hardly a newcomer to the field, so how did it happen that he agreed to let her wing it?
Well, he didn't, exactly. As Ortega explained in the interview, "Initially they wanted a flash mob, but I thought no way Wednesday would be cool dancing and encouraging a group of people."
So when they decided to not do some kind of circle dance, Burton agreed to let her do her own thing. One week before shooting the dance, the Cramps song was chosen, and Ortega says she was "super pumped."
Burton spoke with her in her trailer two days before the shoot and, according to Ortega, said, "Hey Jenna, I know you said you wanted to choreograph this yourself because I refused to see a choreographer... I know you've got it, you've been working on it, I'm not even worried about it, I trust you.'"
Ortega assured him all was well, but "I had not gone over it at all," she told Fallon. "I just didn't have time. I was kicking myself."
So she spent those next two days not sleeping, just doing research by watching old videos of goth kids dancing in clubs in the 1980s; plus videos by artists like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Nina Hagen. "Anything I could get my hands on," she said. "And on the day, I thought, 'Well, all right, I'm just gonna do it.'"
And it is a wild, totally Wednesday dance she put on, expressionless yet laser-focused. It's gone so viral that everyone from Lady Gaga to Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin have done their own versions.
That said, the dance came with some controversy: She shot the scenes while waiting for a COVID test to come back ... and when it did, it came back positive. That means you're watching a COVID-positive actor put her all into getting that dance just right.
"It was my first day with COVID so it was awful to film," she told the NME in November. "They were giving me medicine between takes because we were waiting on the positive result."
Since then, her dance has become a TikTok sensation.
"Netflix, they were telling me, 'Jenna, this is going to be a thing on TikTok,'" she told Fallon. "I figured they're excited, they were getting hyped up, but they were right!"