Jenna Ortega Wows in Two Show-Stopping Looks at Rome Film Festival for ‘Klara and the Sun’

Jenna Ortega didn’t just show up in Rome. She showed up twice, in two completely different moods, and left the Rome Film Festival with one of the best-dressed weekends of her career already in the bag.

On Saturday, October 17, the 24-year-old star of Klara and the Sun joined director Taika Waititi at the 21st Rome Film Festival, held at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, for a photocall and a screening of their new film. It was the kind of stop that festival circuits are built for: a beloved book adaptation, a crowd-pleasing cast, and a leading lady who knows exactly how to work a red carpet. Ortega delivered on all three counts, and then some.

By the time the day was over, she’d worn vintage Pierre Cardin, a brand-new Roberto Cavalli gown, and a pair of heels tall enough to make the whole thing look effortless. The film itself hits theaters on October 20, 2026, which means this Rome appearance was less of a casual pit stop and more of a final lap before the movie meets its audience. If the goal was to get people talking before opening day, mission accomplished.

Two Looks, One Afternoon

Ortega’s first look of the day was the riskier one, and honestly, the more interesting one. For the photocall, she stepped out in a vintage Pierre Cardin dress: a structured white sleeveless shift with a big, bold target graphic in red, yellow, and black splashed across the front. It’s the kind of piece that could swallow a lesser dresser whole. Graphic prints at that scale don’t leave much room to hide. But Ortega wore it like it was the most natural thing in the world, pairing it with pale yellow Le Silla slingback pumps and a bold red lip, her hair pulled back into a messy low ponytail with loose strands framing her face.

There’s something kind of perfect about a vintage Cardin on a photocall carpet. Photocalls are the daytime shift of festival life. The lighting is harsher, the poses are looser, and the clothes have to do the talking without the help of evening glamour. A graphic mod-era dress fits that brief exactly. It photographed like a poster, and Ortega knew it. She posed next to Waititi, who wore a patterned gray double-breasted suit, and the two of them looked like they were having the time of their lives.

Then came the outfit change, and the whole temperature of the day shifted. For the screening, Ortega swapped the mod shift for a gown from the Roberto Cavalli SS27 collection: an ivory, abstract floral-print number with a plunging neckline, metallic gold and green accents, and an open crossed-back detail that showed off the dress from every angle. She finished it with Dolce & Gabbana platform sandals and Damiani jewelry, and let her dark hair fall in voluminous waves with a side part. Where the photocall look was sharp and graphic, this one was soft and painterly, like watercolor that decided to get dressed up.

Waititi, for his part, went full evening mode too, trading the patterned suit for an all-black ensemble and a pair of David Yurman Streamline cufflinks in black mother of pearl. The two of them posed together again on the carpet, and the contrast between his monochrome tailoring and her swirling green-and-gold gown made for the kind of photo that ends up everywhere by morning.

Two looks in one day is a lot of pressure for anyone, even someone who does this for a living. Ortega made it look easy, which is sort of her whole thing at this point.

What Klara and the Sun Is Actually About

Okay, the film itself. Klara and the Sun comes from the bestselling novel by Kazuo Ishiguro — yeah, the Nobel Prize guy — and Taika Waititi wrote and directed it. That’s the Jojo Rabbit Waititi, the one who won an Oscar and then went off and did whatever he wanted. Ortega plays Klara, an Artificial Friend. Think robot companion, built to keep a lonely kid company, except this one just really, really wants to find the perfect home. Then Klara meets Josie, played by Mia Tharia, and the two of them click instantly. Like they’ve been waiting for each other and didn’t even know it.

Josie’s life is a mess, honestly. Her relationship with her mom, played by Amy Adams, is strained. The family’s been through real loss, the kind that doesn’t just go away. And then Klara shows up. Her innocence, her loyalty, that stubborn little belief that things can still get better — it starts to thaw the whole household out. It’s a grief-and-healing story told through the eyes of a machine learning what it means to actually care about somebody. Sounds like a tearjerker? It is. That’s Ishiguro for you. The man wrote Never Let Me Go. Light and breezy is not his thing.

The cast around Ortega? Stacked. Adams is Josie’s mom. Tharia is Josie. Then you’ve got Aran Murphy, Steve Buscemi, and Natasha Lyonne filling out the rest. Heavyweight dramatic talent mixed in with left-field character actors — that’s a very Waititi lineup. He loves throwing unexpected people into the same room and watching what sparks.

And for Ortega, this part is a real swing. Klara isn’t a scream queen. She’s not a snarky teenager, not a gothic outsider. She’s gentle. Curious. She looks at the world with fresh eyes and asks the questions everybody else stopped asking years ago. Playing someone whose whole thing is wide-eyed wonder — that’s a different muscle than nailing Wednesday Addams’ deadpan stare. And it could show people a side of Ortega they haven’t seen yet.

Why This Role Is a Swing for Ortega

Take a second and think about how fast this all happened. Ortega started as a kid actor — Disney Channel’s Stuck in the Middle, a young Jane on Jane the Virgin. Then You. Then the Scream movies. Then Wednesday in 2022, and boom, she was everywhere. The Netflix show turned her into a global star basically overnight, and ever since, she’s been picking projects like someone with a plan.

The pattern isn’t hard to spot. She goes for directors with a real point of view — Tim Burton on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the horror crowd on Scream and X, now Waititi on a literary sci-fi drama. And she goes for characters who are a little off-center, a little strange, the ones who don’t quite fit in whatever room they’re standing in. Klara fits that to a T. She’s literally not human. She’s trying to figure out how humans work. I can’t think of a more Ortega-coded role, honestly.

What’s changed is the size of the stage. A few years back, Ortega was the breakout star of a streaming show. Now? She’s headlining a movie based on a Nobel laureate’s novel. Directed by an Oscar winner. Co-starring a six-time Oscar nominee. Walking the carpet at a major European film festival. Different league entirely. And the timing’s no accident, either. Klara and the Sun lands in theaters October 20, days after this Rome appearance. The festival stop was her shot at setting the tone for opening week.

She’s also on one of those runs where every project lands on top of the last one. Wednesday‘s second season, her film work, a fashion profile that keeps climbing. Ortega’s quietly become one of the most-watched young actors in Hollywood. Not the loudest one. Not the most controversial one. Just the one whose choices keep paying off.

Waititi, Adams, and the Company She’s Keeping

It doesn’t hurt that the people around this movie are the kind of names that make awards watchers sit up. Waititi won an Oscar for writing Jojo Rabbit, then spent the years since bouncing between Marvel blockbusters, prestige TV, and weird little personal projects. Taking on Ishiguro? That’s about as prestige as it gets. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and his books have this way of living in your head for weeks after you finish them. Quiet on the surface. Devastating underneath. Adapting one is a high-wire act, no way around it.

Then there’s Adams. Six Oscar nominations, zero wins — a stat that comes up every single awards season like clockwork. She plays Josie’s mom, the emotional center of the family’s grief. Her scenes with Ortega are probably going to be the ones people talk about once the reviews drop. Put an actor of Adams’ caliber across from a younger star playing an artificial being who’s learning how to feel, and you’ve got the kind of contrast that can make a whole movie sing.

The supporting cast fills the world out nicely. Buscemi is one of those actors who makes everything he’s in a little stranger and a little better. Lyonne brings this lived-in, raspy warmth that fits a story about found family. And Tharia, as Josie, has the toughest job of the bunch: playing a grieving teenager opposite a robot who might just be the most emotionally honest character in the entire film.

Put it all together and the movie could go a bunch of different ways. Weepy sci-fi drama? Quiet awards-season player? The kind of film that makes you cry in the theater and then argue about it on the drive home? Could be any of those. Whatever it turns out to be, the Rome screening was its coming-out party, and Ortega and Waititi showed up like they knew it.

Rome Did What Rome Does

There’s also something to be said for the setting. The Rome Film Festival, now in its 21st edition, has become one of the fall’s key stops for movies trying to build momentum before awards season kicks into gear. The Auditorium Parco della Musica, with its sweeping Renzo Piano architecture, is one of the prettiest venues on the festival circuit. It doesn’t have Cannes’ chaos or Venice’s old-world glamour, but it has something else: a genuinely enthusiastic audience and a city that treats a film festival like a holiday.

Ortega has done the European festival rounds before, and she knows how they work. You show up, you give the photographers something worth shooting, you talk about the movie with real enthusiasm, and you let the pictures do the rest. She did all of that in Rome, twice over, in two outfits that couldn’t have been more different from each other.

The fashion side of the weekend deserves its own mention, because Ortega’s red carpet game has been on a serious run. The vintage Cardin was a fashion-nerd flex: a piece with real history, worn in a way that felt current instead of costumey. The Cavalli gown was pure old-school movie-star glamour, the kind of dress that exists to be photographed from twenty different angles. Between the two of them, she covered the whole spectrum, from mod-art cool to full-on leading-lady polish. Stylists dream about days like this. So do photographers.

And then, of course, there was the timing. With the film opening in theaters on October 20, the Rome appearance landed at exactly the right moment: close enough to release that people would connect the dress with the movie, and far enough out that the photos had the whole weekend to travel. That’s not an accident. That’s a rollout working the way it’s supposed to.

By the end of the night, Ortega and Waititi had done the photocall, the screening, and the carpet, and the movie had one more festival stamp in its passport. Next stop: theaters. If the Rome reception is any guide, Klara and the Sun is about to get a lot of attention, and its star is ready for every bit of it.

Source: Just Jared