The Stars of Yellowjackets Are Ready to Talk About What Happened in the Woods
The series' 1996 cast spoke to Jezebel about their time on TV's buzziest new show.
EntertainmentTV
Image: Paul Sarkis/SHOWTIME
While they were in Vancouver to film Yellowjackets, actors Jasmin Savoy Brown and Tawny Cypress visited a park to practice eating dirt. On the Showtime series, the two actors portray the same character, the smart, self-possessed, and cruelly pragmatic Taissa, at two different points in her life. So they consulted with each other to make sure that their depictions shared some of the small details of behavior that tend to persist over the years, such as whether someone pronounces “either” as “ee-ther” or “eye-ther.” But nailing down other parts of their performances required more hands-on work—hence the trip to the park. The dirt-eating approach they landed on finds Taissa down on her haunches, frightening and feral. “Arms kind of forward and hanging,” Brown told Jezebel of the stance. “It’s very animal, very dirty, very aggressive.”
“I think we got some weird looks,” she added.
Over the course of its first season, which ends with Sunday’s finale, the buzz around Yellowjackets has risen to a dull roar. The series, created by the married producing team of Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, tells the story of a high school soccer team stranded in the woods in 1996 after the plane carrying them to nationals crashes. Each episode toggles in time between the immediate aftermath of the crash and the lives of the survivors in present-day middle age. Even on paper, the show sounds like a hit, tapping squarely into ‘90s nostalgia and featuring in its cast Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis, who were among the decade’s most memorable young stars. Which means that the actors playing the ‘90s Yellowjackets had a tough job to do: Not only were they to serve as believable approximations of beloved performers, versions of whom circa 1996 are very much still alive in viewers’ memories, but they also had to carve out performances that could stand on their own.
It helps that the series was one of last year’s best-written shows. Yellowjackets opens with a murder, as an unidentifiable girl attempts (and fails) to evade eerie, animal skin-clad pursuers through a snowy wilderness. The rest of the season jumps back and forth between the prologue to and aftermath of the bloody ritualized killing, and, it’s suggested, accompanying cannibal feast. In the 1996 timeline, the members of the team contend with the normal struggles found at the borderline of childhood and adulthood—romances, rivalries, and college plans—first on the soccer pitch and at keggers, and then in the woods, where the threat of exposure and starvation only adds to their woes. Twenty-five years later, they’re still struggling with the aftermath of their mysterious and traumatic 19 months in the wild, which manifests in each survivor’s life in different and alarming ways, from Natalie’s drug addiction to Shauna’s flashes of violence to Taissa’s sleepwalking fits of dirt-eating.
The series was filmed in and around Vancouver, with its older cast shooting their scenes in the suburbs for one week at a time, with the younger Yellowjackets filming in the woods the next week. And, because few of the stars were told all of the mystery series’ twists and turns before receiving their scripts, they often were unsure of just what was coming for the characters.
“I will never forget the first day of coming on set and seeing the plane crash,” said Samantha Hanratty, who plays Misty in the ‘90s timeline. “It went from being kind of like, ‘Wow, this is so cool,’ to very surreal and very anxiety-inducing for me, personally, just seeing the wreckage… it was really, really intense in the beginning.”

Over the course of the season, the teenagers find that the social hierarchies of their normal lives don’t quite graft onto their new crisis world. Shauna, longtime sidekick to team Queen Bee Jackie, finds her stock rising as her best friend’s falls, as influence within the group shifts to a maybe-addled, maybe-psychic girl named Lottie (Courtney Eaton), who, like Jackie (Ella Purnell) has yet to appear on the show in adulthood.
For Misty, whose prior participation in the Red Cross babysitter training program elevates her to team doctor after the crash, the sojourn in the woods seems to turbocharge tendencies towards violence and vindictiveness. In the present day-sequences, Christina Ricci gives a hilarious performance as an adult Misty whose psychopathy is in full bloom, an Annie Wilkes-style nurse who keeps a pet bird named Caligula and whose gestures of affection might include bugging your house and sabotaging your car. Hanratty’s earlier take on the character is both more innocent and more reactive. “Even though our characters are obviously the same person, we also play things very differently,” she said. “My stuff in the nineties is based off of her not knowing how to manipulate as well, and her feeling that sense of power for the first time in her life.”