Jenna Ortega is heading into stranger territory than Nevermore. The ”Wednesday” star will play the lead in Lily May B, the seventh feature from French filmmaker Leos Carax, a project described as a post-apocalyptic road movie about three people riding a big motorcycle across a world that has already ended.
That setup sounds simple enough, which is usually the first warning sign with Carax. The director behind ”Annette” and ”Holy Motors” has built a career on turning genre labels into fever dreams, and this one appears to keep that streak alive while giving Ortega a leading role in a very different register from her best-known TV work.
What Lily May B is about
The film centers on a girl, a boy, and a young woman searching for shelter in a ruined world. They travel together on a large motorcycle, which is both a practical escape vehicle and a pretty decent metaphor for survival when civilization has checked out.
No release date has been announced, so this is still in the long, slightly mysterious phase that suits Carax more than it would most filmmakers. For an international audience that has lately rewarded franchise comfort, the project looks like a deliberate swing back toward art-house spectacle.
Jenna Ortega’s next moves
Ortega is also set to appear in the screen adaptation of ”Klara and the Sun” before the end of the year, while she is currently filming the third season of ”Wednesday”. That puts her on a fairly aggressive run: prestige adaptation, hit streaming series, then a Carax film that is unlikely to behave itself.
- Lead role: Jenna Ortega
- Director: Leos Carax
- Genre: post-apocalyptic road movie
- Release date: not announced
Why Jenna Ortega and Leos Carax stand out together
Carax has never been a volume producer, and that scarcity is part of the appeal: each new film lands as an event rather than a product. Ortega, meanwhile, has become one of the few young actors who can move between mainstream fandom and eccentric auteur cinema without looking like she is apologizing for either.
If Lily May B keeps even half of that ambition on screen, it should find an audience that likes its end-of-the-world stories a little more poetic, a little more damaged, and a lot less tidy. The real question is whether Carax makes this a survival story or a hallucination with wheels.