Jenna Ortega Reveals She Auditioned for Zendaya’s Role in Dune

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Can you imagine anyone other than Zendaya portraying Chani in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune saga? According to Jenna Ortega, the role could have gone to her in a parallel universe.

In a new puppy interview with BuzzFeed, Jenna Ortega was asked about a role people would be surprised to learn she auditioned for. She admitted she’s pretty sure she went for the role of Chani in Dune, which ultimately went to Zendaya.

“I auditioned for Dune when I was about 15,” Ortega says in the video. “I remember just being a big fan of that film, franchise, and everything like that.” Ortega added that she was “really excited” for the audition since Villeneuve is “one of [her] favorite filmmakers.”

While Ortega is pretty sure the role she went for is Zendaya’s, she can’t quite put her finger on it. “I think it was Chani, I think it was Zendaya’s. But they weren’t saying that. Everything was very secret,” she admits.

It’s pretty standard for high-profile roles to audition with entirely different prompts. Earlier this year, the cast of Netflix’s live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender admitted they actually had no clue what they were auditioning for. “What the team at Avatar had done was write fake scripts for us so that we had no idea what the [real] script was,” Dallas Liu, who plays Zuko, admitted.

Elsewhere in the interview, Ortega, who’s currently promoting Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, got candid about her experience working with  Tim Burton both in the long-anticipated sequel and season 2 of Netflix’s Wednesday.

“On Wednesday, we were just trying to get to know each other a bit. On Beetlejuice, he seemed a lot more playful, and I think it actually helped our relationship a lot,” Ortega said of the famed director. “It was just a very joyous, happy shoot.”

Ortega also took the chance to shower her co-stars with praises, including on-screen mom Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, and Catherine O’Hara, who all reprise their roles from the original 1988 movie.

You can watch Jenna Ortega’s full puppy interview below:

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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