Jenna Ortega has made a career out of proving that great acting is about far more than memorizing lines and looking good on camera. In the newly released Klara and the Sun, the actress takes on a decidedly different challenge as Klara, a solar-powered artificial companion who befriends a sickly teenager named Josie and tries to help her grieving mother heal.

Directed by Taika Waititi, the science-fiction drama gives Ortega another chance to show off her impressive range. After playing serious, often stoic characters like Wednesday, Ortega had to dig deeper to capture Klara’s almost toddler-like characteristics. Fortunately, her tiny teachers were closer than one might have expected.

Jenna Ortega has played plenty of characters who can command a room with a single look, but her latest role required a different kind of performance. For Klara and the Sun, to capture Klara’s childlike awkwardness, Ortega turned to some very familiar sources: her niece and nephews.

"Taika, very early on in the process, likened Klara to a baby or a toddler,” Ortega told PEOPLE. “The clumsiness was inspired by my nieces and nephews,” she further added. 

“I wanted to do something different because this is a very different character from anything I had played before,” Ortega expressed.

Rather than rely on the brooding intensity that made Wednesday Addams such a memorable character, Ortega explored the physical quirks of someone discovering the world with fresh eyes. The comparison to toddlers, thus, gave her a wonderfully unexpected starting point.

 With a newborn niece and young nephews in her family, including five siblings, the actress had plenty of pint-sized inspiration nearby that she talked to PEOPLE about. Their unsteady movements and unfiltered reactions helped her shape Klara into a character unlike any she had played before.

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Unlike the difficulty she had filming with Amy Adams, Jenna Ortega did not find it difficult to throw in pieces of people that she knew into her AI character, whether it be her little niece and nephews or her friend's special way to run.

Jenna Ortega did not stop at borrowing mannerisms from her niece and nephews to make Klara feel convincingly childlike. The actress also slipped a friend’s unusual way of walking into the performance, adapting the habit of holding up her pinkies into a gesture involving her index fingers instead. What began as an odd personal quirk became another piece of Klara’s distinctive physical language.

That particular gesture also found a place within Taika Waititi’s vision of the artificial companion. After the director mentioned the sensors inside Klara’s body, Ortega connected the idea to the iconic finger movements of E.T., giving her character’s hands an almost otherworldly quality. The result was a collection of real-life observations, reworked into a mannerism that belonged entirely to Klara.

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What do you think of Jenna Ortega's little inspirations? Let us know in the comments!