Jenna Ortega would like everyone to spend a little less time staring at screens. The 24-year-old actress stars as the title character in Klara and the Sun, director Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, and she hopes the film encourages audiences to be more present with the people around them.
“I think we gotta put our focus on one another and put down the computers and phones,” Ortega told Variety. “Remember to be present and to appreciate people while they’re standing right in front of you.”
That message fits the material.
Ortega plays Klara, an artificial friend whose understanding of the world comes from observation rather than from consuming massive amounts of online data. Ortega said that distinction shaped her approach to the performance.
“AI, I guess, pulls all this information from the internet and Klara gets all her information from the real world,” she said.
Rather than playing Klara as cold or mechanical, Ortega said Waititi wanted something more human and slightly awkward.
“She’s kind of like a toddler in a sense,” Ortega explained, adding that the character’s movement was intentionally less robotic and more “clumsy and unknowing.”
That approach also sets Klara and the Sun apart from many contemporary AI stories.
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Ishiguro acknowledged that the culture around artificial intelligence has shifted dramatically since his novel was published five years ago, but said the film is not interested in turning Klara into another machine-gone-bad cautionary tale.
“This film doesn’t address a lot of the anxieties that you and I may have right now about where we’re going with the technology,” Ishiguro said.
He added that the film is arriving in a very different climate than the novel did, but made clear that this is not the familiar story of an apparently benevolent AI becoming sinister and killing everyone.
For Ortega, the emotional core seems much simpler.
Pay attention to the person in front of you.
That idea also feels particularly resonant coming from an actress who has spoken candidly about the isolating side of sudden fame.
Ortega became a global star through Netflix’s Wednesday, but she has previously said the attention that followed was difficult to process.
“To be quite frank, after the show and trying to figure everything out, I was an unhappy person,” she told Harper’s Bazaar, describing the pressure and visibility as especially intense for someone naturally introverted.
She now serves as a producer on Wednesday, giving her more creative involvement behind the scenes and in front of the camera.
But with Klara and the Sun, the message Ortega is emphasizing is not about celebrity, technology or even AI.
It is about presence.
And in a world built to make us look anywhere except at each other, that may be the most radical idea in the movie.
