‘Big Mistakes’ Star Taylor Ortega on Chemistry with Dan Levy & Laurie Metcalf

Who can blame Taylor Ortega for feeling like a fan while acting opposite her onscreen mother, when that person happens to be Laurie Metcalf? 

“I mean, every girl dreams of it,” Ortega says, deadpan but in earnest. “So I’m really blessed to be one of the girls who gets to experience it. Laurie Metcalf is so talented, so funny. She’s someone who performs very actively. She’s very alive, but she also takes her comedy so seriously, but she’s doing something that’s gut-bustingly funny.  And I just feel like I’m the audience member watching something. It’s incredible.”

Ortega is making her major project debut opposite Metcalf and Dan Levy in the new Netflix series “Big Mistakes,” created by Levy and Rachel Sennott. The show stars Levy and Ortega as siblings Nicky and Morgan, who accidentally get caught up in a criminal gang after an attempt to steal a necklace for their grandma goes wrong. 

When Ortega got an audition request for “Big Mistakes,” she immediately felt close to Morgan. 

“She grew up in [New] Jersey, her personality was so close to mine, she’s Italian. And I thought, ‘Wow, it’s a really close match, but who knows?’” she says. Six months after submitting an audition tape, she was asked to tape again, followed by a chemistry read with Levy. From then on, the role became hers. 

“It was definitely a role that I’ve slid into a lot more easily,” Ortega says. “I think Morgan is a bit of a past version of myself in many ways. I wouldn’t say beat for beat, but she’s definitely struggling this season and spending a lot of time living at home, spending a lot of time back with her family, who she tried to escape. She’s low vibrational at times. And many times she’s vibrating love, but we all have that side to us. And at times that side is taking the reins 24/7. And so she was very fun to play.”

Ortega credits growing up in New Jersey with developing her comedic side.

“Everyone there is kind of funny,” she says. ‘And it’s a very expressive place. Humor is a way that everyone communicates in New Jersey. My whole family is very funny. Everyone was a very big character.”

She did musical theater throughout school and moved to New York afterward, with the objective of waiting tables and doing improv.

“I was really bad at one and really pretty good at the other,” she deadpans. 

Over time she built a community of comedians and collaborators within improv, but was thinking “very presently” — aka, leaping to television — was never the objective. 

Even now, as she’s embarking on her first major press tour for a project, the feeling of having “made it” still eludes her. 

“That moment comes and goes,” she says. “The first job I booked was a hosting gig where I rode a bus across the country and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the most money I’ll ever make. This is incredible and I’ve done it. I’m here for life.’ And then you struggle to work again. You struggle to make ends meet. You struggle to be consistent, which is so normal for this business. And your nervous system has to get used to the uncertainty. I mean, it took me years and years, and then you just go, ‘I can’t live every day afraid.’ I have to just go, ‘Yeah, I’m going to work again.’”

It’s here where her community comes in again. 

“You tell your creative friends, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to work again.’ And they tell you, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll work again.’ A pattern emerges,” she says. “A pattern of you doing work emerges, a pattern of creating your own work emerges. And I think then that starts to make you feel more secure.”

While waiting for audiences to meet “Big Mistakes,” Ortega is at work on a short film with some friends, about a group of 25-year-olds who discover a secret one of them has been keeping from the rest of the group. “Working on the project in the midst of her Netflix press push has given us something to obsess over,” she says. 

“It feels very grounding because I’m doing something I really don’t understand, paired with something that feels just familiar and comfortable and exciting and fulfilling,” she adds. “It’s sort of like waiting tables and improv.”