Spoiler Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ti West’s X.
Jenna Ortega’s breakout role of Lorraine Day in Ti West’s X is one of the best characters in her career. Set in Texas in 1979, X follows a pornographic film crew as they’re killed off one by one during the shooting of their movie. X is one of Jenna Ortega’s best movies, as it showcases her ability to be convincing in a role that’s part damsel in distress, part bold and sexually liberating, given the film’s subject material. Throughout the film, Ortega’s Lorraine Day demonstrates a great deal of character development, which has a lot to do with what makes her performance so memorable.
Lorraine is one of the smartest characters in X, as she’s perceptive and intuitive, being one of the first characters to realize something is wrong when they get to the desolate farmhouse to shoot their next film. However, as smart as she may be, her young age sometimes compels her to act on emotion rather than logic. As such, Ortega’s young age during filming of the 2022 horror movie becomes even more impressive given the level of maturity, cleverness, and amount of depth that Ortega brings to an otherwise generic, wide-eyed protagonist.
X Movie Ending Explained (In Detail)
Ti West’s slasher X introduced Mia Goth’s Pearl and showcases the wider horror genre in its bloody finale, but what happens at the end of the X movie?
Jenna Ortega Was 18 Years Old When She Filmed X
Ortega’s performance displayed a substantial amount of maturity despite her age.
Born in 2002, Ortega was 18 years old during X‘s February-March 2021 production, which effectively made her the youngest member of the main cast. Despite her young age, Ortega shines as one of the film’s most intelligent and insightful characters as Lorraine often questions the ethics of what she and her much older co-stars are doing. However, while Lorraine proves to be an intelligent young woman, her curiosity causes her to eventually want to partake in the production, something that angers her boyfriend and inadvertently leads to nearly everyone’s death.
How Jenna Ortega’s Age In X Compares To Her Character Lorraine
It is implied that Lorraine is either 19 or 20 in X.
Lorraine is 19 years old in X, which is one of the reasons why her boyfriend, RJ, doesn’t want her to participate in the pornographic film they’re making. While RJ doesn’t have any issues filming the rest of his crew, he takes exception to Lorraine’s involvement in it since he believes it will ruin the artistic integrity of his film. However, Lorraine, along with some of the others, points out the hypocrisy in RJ’s rhetoric, which causes him to relent and direct the scene. While Lorraine’s participation in the production is sudden, it highlights one of X‘s key themes.
One of X‘s themes is about aging and its impact on one’s sex life. The characters filming their pornographic film on the antagonists Pearl and Howard’s farmhouse remind Pearl of the wasted years of her youth and the lack of sex she had with Howard on account of his obligations to serve his country during WWII. This is contrasted with Lorraine’s youthfulness along with hers and the rest of the crew’s sexual exploits that lead to almost all of their deaths. The young age of X’s protagonist played a key role in getting across the film’s themes.
