Jenna Ortega didn't blink for eight months 😨👁️

In partnership with

Aug 29, 2026

RIDDLE OF THE DAY

I can carry thousands of people and still fit in your pocket. What am I

The answer is revealed below

Made In makes the cookware the world's best kitchens actually cook on. Our stainless, carbon steel, and forged knives are trusted in Michelin-starred restaurants and loved by millions of home cooks, built by master craftspeople using techniques honed over generations. No gimmicks. Just professional-grade tools that perform and last a lifetime.

Right now, that same cookware is at its lowest prices of the year. The End of Season Sale is live with up to 40% off, from the pans you reach for every night to full sets that outfit a kitchen in one move. It's the best time all season to trade up.

The cookware chefs choose, at the price home cooks have been waiting for.

Shop the End of Season Sale.

THE UNBLINKING STARE THAT MADE WEDNESDAY ICONIC NEARLY BROKE JENNA ORTEGA

When Netflix's Wednesday became the most-watched English-language series in the platform's history, one detail stood out above everything else: the stare.

Jenna Ortega's unsettling, dead-eyed gaze became the show's signature, instantly recognizable, endlessly memed, impossible to look away from.

But it wasn't an accident. It was Tim Burton's idea.

Burton wanted Wednesday to feel genuinely inhuman, something that couldn't quite be explained by acting alone. So during filming, he gave Ortega one strange, specific instruction: don't blink.

She tried it during a few takes, and Burton loved it immediately. He told her to keep doing it, scene after scene, for the rest of the shoot.

What sounded like a simple acting choice became an eight-month ordeal.

Filming took place in Romania during brutal winter conditions, with harsh winds constantly whipping across the set. For most actors, that would mean watery eyes and constant blinking.

But for Ortega, blinking wasn't an option. She had to train herself to sneak blinks only during her scene partners' lines, timing her relief around every single line of dialogue that wasn't hers.

Month after month, she held her stare through freezing conditions, long takes, and constant physical strain, all to maintain a look Burton refused to let go of.

But after eight months of never blinking on camera, what happened to Jenna's eyes was the most brutal part of the whole shoot.

RIDDLE HINT: NONE OF THEM IS PHYSICALLY INSIDE.

THE INTERNET'S FAVORITE "DADDY" ORIGIN STORY BEGAN WITH AN EMBASSY WALL AND A DICTATOR

Pedro Pascal's birth should have been a joyous moment for his parents. Instead, they were hiding for their lives.

His mother and father had spent years secretly working against Chile's brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet, risking everything for the resistance.

When the danger became too great, Pascal's parents made their move. They scaled the walls of the Venezuelan embassy and claimed asylum, fleeing with their children to the United States as refugees.

Growing up, Pascal faced relentless bullying, constant moves, and the challenge of learning a new language and culture from scratch. He found comfort in movies and plays, eventually enrolling in NYU's prestigious Tisch School of the Arts.

Just as his acting career was beginning to take shape, the family's past caught up with them in an entirely new way.

Pascal's father, a fertility doctor, was accused of unthinkable crimes. Prosecutors alleged he and two colleagues had taken embryos from unknowing patients and implanted them into other women without consent.

Facing indictment, Pascal's parents fled the United States entirely, returning to Chile, the very country they had escaped two decades earlier as refugees.

But what that scandal did to Pedro's own acting career, just as it was starting to take off, was something nobody saw coming.