Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Yellowjackets.
The Showtime drama seriesYellowjacketsis part survival, part psychological horror, and part coming of age tale that follows a team of high school girls' soccer players that survive a plane crash deep in the wilderness and have to do unspeakable things to stay alive long enough to be rescued. At the same time, we also see the young women who made it through that ordeal 25 years later, each coping with what they went through in different ways, but now all fighting their demons together.
During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider,Melanie Lynskey(who plays Shauna, a woman stuck in a life she doesn’t want with the former prom king and a daughter that barely wants anything to do with her) talked about the many layers this show has to uncover, how much she was told about how the story would evolve, what excited her about playing this character, collaborating withSophie Nélisse(who plays the teenage Shauna) as they shared the role, that poor rabbit, the guilt that Shauna lives with, and the earliest professional experiences she had that made an impression on her, as an actor.
Collider: I’m completely compelled, riveted, and fascinated by this series, this story, and these women. There are so many layers and so much to dig into, which must be fun as an actor.
MELANIE LYNSKEY: Oh, my gosh, yeah. There are so many different layers to it. That was really the thing that interested me. It’s so scary to sign onto something for potentially what could be a number of years. And so, it was nice to know that there was enough there to keep uncovering, as the seasons went on.
As a viewer, it’s easy to see why you’d want to do this, but what was it that actually sold you on it, when you don’t have all of that information to go on, you don’t know what the answers to the mystery are, and you don’t know where the characters are going to end up?
LYNSKEY: Honestly, they gave me a lot of the information when they pitched the show to me because I was nervous and I wanted to be sure that they had a plan. You can write a cool pilot and have a cool idea, and not really know where to take it. That was my concern. I just thought, “Oh, gosh, I really hope that they know there’s a lot of characters to keep track of and a lot of plot to keep track of,” and they had answers to everything. It was so meticulous and so well thought out, and that was really impressive. I just trusted them and I was right to because, the whole season, the writing was really, really good and really, really strong. She felt really real to me, and like somebody who was doing her best to hold it together and just unable to do so and making terrible choices. Terrible choices are always fun to play, as an actor.
One of the things that impressed me the most about this is that there aren’t just a lot of characters, but there are double the characters because we’re watching them in two times. We really feel like we get to know everybody, even though there are so many characters, and that just felt really impressive.
LYNSKEY: Yeah, I totally agree. I think that’s such a good point. There were times when I would be reading a new script and a smaller character would have one line and I would laugh in recognition of how right for the character that line was. I was like, “Gosh, everyone is so well-drawn that you know even more peripheral people really, really well when and you come to really care about everybody. I think that’s important when there are high stakes, and some people surviving and some people not surviving. You really need to really care about everyone who’s there.
I’m very familiar with all of you in the older cast, and these all felt like very different characters than any of you have played. Were there aspects of this character that you were most looking forward to digging into because they were things you hadn’t got to do in a character before?
LYNSKEY: Yeah. It’s always the thing that feels scary to me that I know is gonna be the biggest challenge. There’s a hard edge to her, and a toughness and almost a meanness at times, that I felt really excited by. I don’t really have that in my life and I haven’t gotten to play it that much. I watched the pilot and the second episode with my husband and my nanny, and there was the scene where I confront the reporter and my nanny was like, “I’ve never seen you be mean. It’s so weird.” But it’s good that she’s never seen that side of me. She was looking at me differently. It’s really fun to do something that is so out of character.
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I have to say that I was a little bit terrified of you in this. The moment when your character makes the decision to kill the rabbit and cook it, it’s a bit shocking. It’s such an interesting moment because she makes this decision and then decides to tell her family about it but then pretends that she was kidding about it. What do you think that was in her, that she makes that decision and does that and tells the truth about it, but then tries to cover it up so that it doesn’t sound as awful?
LYNSKEY: That is the exact perfect encapsulation of everything that Shauna is. She has a very dark instinct. She has a survival instinct and a vengeful side to her. A rabbit is fucking with her garden, so she’s gonna kill it and use the rabbit. She’s angry at her husband and she’s angry at her daughter, so she wants to have that shock moment where they’re horrified that they’re eating something they didn’t think they were eating, but then she doesn’t want to deal with the long-term consequences of people actually being mad at her, so she’s like, “Oh, nevermind. That was a lie.” She doesn’t wanna actually have anyone be upset or deal with any kind of confrontation. She’s a very interesting person. It’s not how I carry myself at all.
Should we also be concerned about what else she’s capable of? Is this a gateway to her becoming a serial killer?
LYNSKEY: There is something very dark in her. I feel a little bit nervous, as the person that has to play her, about what the truth holds. There were times where I really had to let go. There’s a freedom in letting go of the idea that people have to be likable in every moment. They don’t. People make selfish decisions and bad decisions, and people are dark.
What were the biggest challenges for you, in tracking what’s going on with her younger self and how that influences her while you’re playing her? Were there ongoing conversations with Sophie Nélisse about the teenage Shauna? How did you keep track of that?
LYNSKEY: The writers were really good about giving me all of the information that they could. And Sophie and I regularly communicated about what each of us knew, in case there was a piece of the puzzle that the other one didn’t have yet, so we could put that together. The beautiful thing about how the scripts are written is that what’s happening in the past, a lot of the time mirrors, in some way, what’s happening in the present. There were times with my performance where I would think, “What is young Shauna going through right now?” I didn’t wanna take the performance in too much of a different direction. You want it to feel integrated emotionally.
Shauna’s family life is not working out quite so great. What do you think it is that accounts for that? Is it just that she has all of these other things that she’s dealing with and she can’t deal with what’s going on, right in front of her?
LYNSKEY: I think that it’s not really a life that she chose. She’s there out of survivor’s guilt. And I think she’s here. I think she did love Jeff on some level, but she’s also really underestimating him. She made a decision about who he was and hasn’t allowed him to grow at all, in her eyes. She’s so stuck in a particular time and place, emotionally, that she assumes that he is as well. I don’t think she loves being a mother. I don’t think it brings much to her life. She kind of wants a closeness with her daughter, but she also doesn’t know how to get it, and I don’t know if she does truly want it. And then, her daughter is a person who is so different from her. It’s all missed connections and somebody who’s not being honest about who they really are.
Will we start to see her as somebody who wants answers for what’s happening, or do you think she is someone who would rather not be involved and would rather just entirely forget what happened before?
LYNSKEY: I think she has so much guilt about what happened. She feels so ashamed that it’s a topic that’s almost impossible for her to talk about. She’s hasn’t talked about it with her husband. I think she would rather just leave it buried. She just would rather not ever have to talk about it again. And then, like with all trauma, it comes up again. It comes up in the way you relate to people. It’s literally coming up again because people are being blackmailed. Somebody knows and she’s forced to deal with it, but I think she would rather not.
What was the earliest experience that you had on a set that was really positive and a really memorable experience for you, that you feel like you really learned from and that was a turning point for you, in your career and as an actress?
LYNSKEY: My first professional acting job wasHeavenly Creatures, so I got to work with Peter Jackson. I didn’t really know where you go from there, but so much of that was me learning the ropes, literally. They gave me a day of free shooting, where they taught me how to hit a mark, how to look past the camera, and how to find your light. They taught me how to be a film actor. I was learning, and I learned so much from Kate [Winslet] because she’d been working for such a long time, as a professional.
Beyond that, I think there was a moment on the movieShattered Glass, which is a movie I did in 2003. Something about being part of that ensemble and being part of something that was so smart and so well written, that was a moment for me where I was like, “This is how I want it to feel forever. I want to feel this way about the jobs that I do.” That’s not always possible. There are things that I’ve done since then that I’m like, “Ooh, forget about that one.” But that became, after that experience, that gold standard of how I wanted to feel making something, how I wanted to feel about my collaborators, and how I wanted to feel about the finished product.
When you have an experience like that early in your career, you at least learn to trust yourself more. I can’t imagine walking on a set and feeling like you can’t even trust your own instincts.
LYNSKEY: Yeah, I feel for actors who show up and people assume they know everything. There’s so much that’s mysterious and scary. I feel so lucky. It was like acting school and film school. I really was taught everything. It was amazing.
