20-year-old actress Jenna Ortega has the guts to speak out against the stereotype that Gen-Z is ‘unintelligent’

Los Angeles, March 3

Actress Jenna Ortega has shared her two cents on stereotypes about Gen Z. In a new interview, the breakout 'Wednesday' star spoke out against the stereotypes about teenagers that irk her.

The former Disney Channel star addressed the issue when making an appearance on 'Hot Ones' with host Sean Evans, reports aceshowbiz.com.

In the Thursday, March 2 episode, she was asked if there's a Gen Z Trope or stereotype about teens in scripts that "gets under" her skin.

Unsurprisingly, Jenna was quick to call out some misconceptions about high schoolers.

The 'Scream VI' actress noticed that teenagers are often depicted as "unintelligent," which does not reflect her generation because so much is "accessible to them on the Internet."

She went on to insist, "I wish that they were given a bit more credit. We can be smart, sometimes!"

After "a little over a decade" in Hollywood and acknowledging that she does "look a bit younger" than her peers, the 20-year-old actress also said she's over plotlines about "bratty" teens that "bad mouth" everything.

Prior to this, Jenna talked about how she feels that "a lot of" Hollywood bosses still lack awareness of today's issues. Speaking to New York Magazine's The Cut, the "You" star addressed the challenges of meeting "expectations" of what a Latina actress should look like or the kind of roles she should be taking on.

"It goes back to the 'your own worst critic' thing. Nothing anybody else could say is gonna bother me as much as something I could say," Jenna said. "When it comes to Latina expectations, it's so easy for me to brush those off because the people who are in positions of power right now or who have been in positions of power for so long in the industry, a lot of them are out of touch or just not necessarily familiar because they grew up in a very different time."

"So I think that I personally have so much fun pushing the boundaries and doing all of the things that, you know, the Latina character 'shouldn't' do. We were never the hero of the story or the lead of the story, and I love to be able to push back on that," she elaborated.

--IANS