'Yellowjackets' cast shares how they channel their rage into their characters: 'I'll take a drive and just scream'

Yellowjackets is about a lot of things. On its surface, it follows a high school girls' soccer team living in the wilderness after surviving a plane crash, as well as their older counterparts reckoning with the fallout decades later. It’s also about friendship, girlhood, growing up and cannibalism.

In both timelines, the female characters deal with a lot of rage. In addition to the frustrating moments of everyday life, they have pent-up trauma from having to struggle to survive, which, on multiple occasions, resulted in them literally eating their friends.

Melanie Lynskey stars as Shauna, a suburban housewife hiding dark secrets — perhaps the darkest of all her former teammates — about what happened in the wilderness 25 years ago. In a viral Feb. 5 interview on The View, she said she related to her character’s rage.

“I’ve never met a woman who could not relate to having quite a lot of rage, the way the world is getting more and more rageful by the day,” Lynskey said on the daytime talk show. “I really enjoyed the fact that [Shauna] has such a hard time holding it back. She’s doing her best, but she’s also a very complicated human being with so much anger.”

In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Lynskey said Shauna’s grief over losing her best friend (whose body the team later eats) and her newborn baby in the wilderness manifests as rage, which is “a cool thing to show for a female character,” especially in the earlier timeline, in which Shauna is portrayed by Sophie Nélisse.

“It’s not pretty. She’s not suffering in a corner. She’s ready to f*** shit up,” Lynskey said. “As an adult, she’s really doing her best to move beyond it and be a normal person, but she’s still so, so, so angry. … This season shows her embracing it a little more and being like, ‘I feel my most powerful when I’m letting myself feel the way I feel.’”

Tawny Cypress plays adult Taissa, a leader in the wilderness who grows up to be a politician. She’s elected state senator but is impeached before even taking office due to erratic behavior related to her trauma from the wilderness.

“I’m a very angry person,” Cypress told Yahoo Entertainment with a laugh. “My mentor always said, ‘Acting is not therapy!’ but I treat acting as therapy all the time. If I’m mad in my relationship, I use that … You draw from life.”

Christina Ricci plays adult Misty, an offbeat but manipulative woman who remains on the outskirts of the soccer team’s social circle even into adulthood. Ricci has grown more comfortable with her anger than she was when she made her Hollywood debut at age 9.

“My mother yesterday was like, ‘Take a coat!’ I was like, ‘My rage will keep me warm,’” Ricci told Yahoo Entertainment. “I’ve been in show business for a long time, so I like to scream in the car. I’ll take a drive and just scream, then come back and bark.”

Shauna’s daughter Callie never had to survive in the wilderness, but the teenager still experiences a lot of anger. She’s played by Sarah Desjardins, who told Yahoo Entertainment that much of Callie’s rage is internalized.

“It’s coming out in petulant ways … I think that Callie can be misread initially as just being a bratty teenager,” she said. “I think it’s coming from a place of feeling really confused and longing for love from her mother and not understanding the disconnect of why it’s not happening.”

Warren Kole plays Shauna’s husband, Jeff, who maintains an upbeat demeanor even when he’s dragged into dark situations. Kole told Yahoo Entertainment that he wondered why Jeff didn’t have more “rageful moments” in Season 2 and brought up the character’s lack of frustration to the writing team.

“Wisely, they didn’t keep those [moments],” Kole said. “I think [Jeff] keeps it under the surface and has a subconscious expression of rage through him trying to be so helpful and so understanding.”

Simone Kessell and Courtney Eaton play the older and younger versions of Lottie, respectively, whose spiritual visions give way to her position as a cult leader in both timelines. The show constantly toes the line between the psychological and the supernatural, and Lottie always lingers in the gray area between the two.

“I don’t think she’s outwardly rageful, but she has a lot of pain and hurt within her that comes out in specific and uncommon ways,” Eaton told Yahoo Entertainment. “Later on in the season, I think her rage shows itself as this euphoric feeling and lightness in her.”

“Lottie’s scary, man!” Kevin Alves interjected, before Eaton quickly fired back, “No, she’s not!” she said.

Alves plays Travis, one of the few young men who survive the plane crash with the soccer team.

“But in the best way. There’s a lot of power there. It’s actually effortless,” Alves said. “That’s what’s scary to me. Lottie can do anything.”

Though many of the actresses agreed that accessing real-life rage is helpful on set, some spoke out about the importance of not taking the show’s dark themes home with them.

“Two words: Vodka soda,” Kessell said with a laugh.

“We like a nice chardonnay,” Lynskey said. “It’s hard as a woman who has a family, and it’s hard as a woman, in general. There’s a lot of responsibility — a lot falls on your shoulders, and you don’t really get the luxury of bringing work home with you.”

She said there’s always “something to organize and something to be done and someone to take care of.”

“You can’t just be like, ‘Let me let go of Shauna for a few hours!’ You gotta call the plumber,” Lynskey said.

The first two episodes of Yellowjackets Season 3 are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime. Season 3 premieres Feb. 16 on Showtime.