‘Yellowjackets’ Cast Shocked by What’s Coming in Season 3: ‘I Gagged’

You would think it would have been the moment that Shauna took a bite of Jackie’s ear.

Or when the teen ensemble devoured poor Jackie in a gory cannibalism feast. Or perhaps, the harrowing birth episode when Shauna lost her baby out in the wilderness. But there is something still to come in Yellowjackets season three that made Lauren Ambrose gag.

“There was some stuff that I was like gagging while reading. I had to put the script down because I thought it was so disgusting,” Ambrose, who joined the series in season two as Adult Van, tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Yellowjackets returned this weekend with its third season, checking back in with the teenagers who survived a 1996 plane crash that left them stranded in the remote wilderness for 19 months, as well their present-day counterparts who remain haunted by the trauma from their past.

In the wilderness, spring has sprung and with the warm weather comes a reset of sorts, as the teenaged team of Yellowjackets soccer players adjust to their new normal. Some of them tell stories and play games to pass the time, others are in mourning and some of them try to speak to the mysterious wilderness that has perhaps been responsible for some of the shocking events from the first two seasons.

Creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, who co-showrun the hit Showtime series with Jonathan Lisco, told The Hollywood Reporter that with season three will come answers to their mystery series, particularly around what the teenagers did during their time in the wilderness in order to survive. The creative trio has always expressed their intent for cannibalism to not be the most transgressive thing about the survival-horror-coming-of-age saga. The cast, meanwhile, has said season three will bring deaths — more than one — that left some of the cast “bawling” their eyes out.

“What did they do out there? That’s something raised in the very first episode of the show. We learn a lot more about what they did out there this season,” co-creator Lyle told THR.

The gap between many of the teens and their adult counterparts remains wide, and finding out what they did will help explain the adults they become. Perhaps the largest gap is with the two Shaunas, played in the past by Sophie Nélisse and in the present by Melanie Lynskey. As THR‘s TV critic Angie Han noted in her review, “In tandem, the two Shaunas’ arcs paint a layered, if still incomplete, portrait of what was lost and what was gained out there in the wild — supernatural forces or no. It’s terrifying, it’s devastating, it’s riveting. It’s Yellowjackets doing exactly what it does best.”

When speaking to the actors who play the teens and adults, many of them echoed Ambrose’s emotions when finding out these answers themselves.

“There are things that are really shocking. And there are things that are really upsetting, which I won’t go into but, really upsetting,” Lynskey tells THR. The cast runs the gamut of peppering their creators with questions about what’s coming, or going along for the ride and finding out in real time when they get scripts. “Sometimes I have specific questions,” says Lynskey of where she stands. “I’m not trying to find out plot points ahead of time but if something is referenced or I have an interaction with a character, I could have a question for them about something that happened in the past.”

Since the adult and teen casts alternate filming schedules and aren’t on set together, it can be illuminating for the “olders” to read about the past. “It’s always fun to get into what I say is the backstory with the teen story. You always are learning something, figuring out so much more about the characters and also the structure of the society they had and the way that hunts were done and all of that,” adds Lynskey.

Questions still linger around the “hunt” ritual that was introduced at the end of season two. In the past storyline, their hunting, which begins with a deck of cards to see who pulls the Queen of Hearts and is sacrificed to the wilderness, resulted in the group anointing a leader, the so-called “Antler Queen,” with Young Natalie (played by Sophie Thatcher), while in the present-day storyline, their hunt led to the accidental death of Adult Natalie (played by former star Juliette Lewis).

Lynskey, who has previously talked about production restraints when filming that hunt in that season two finale, was the one who drew the card and ran from her friends, who seemed possessed when back in a wilderness setting. “It was such a tiny area and I was like, ‘Am I not running for my life? I want to be able to run!’ And I couldn’t,’” she explains of the location where they filmed being limited. “They were like, ‘Play it as though you don’t really believe them.’ But they’re all giving me serious faces and you believe. It was not my favorite. (Laughs)”

Simone Kessell plays the biggest believer as Adult Lottie, picking up from Courtney Eaton‘s spiritual version in the past timeline. Kessell also joined the cast in season two.

“In the beginning, we knew pieces [about the wilderness]. But as the show evolves, so does their backstory,” she tells THR. “There’s been a couple of times where I thought I should have played it in a different way. But it does give us more when we see what our younger characters are doing, especially this season. We learn how primal all of it really is, and how it’s really stayed with them.”

She adds, “Now I understand why Lottie is so in need of therapy!”

But for Christina Ricci, who plays Adult Misty (who is played by Samantha Hanratty in the past), what shocked her the most was something to come in the present-day story.

“I was genuinely shocked by a few moves, but they were moves in the present time not the past,” she tells THR. “When they go through all their craziness out there, you can understand. They’re surviving. They’re fucked up. It’s all insane. But then when you see the grown version of these people still haunted by their trauma, their PTSD and then they act on it? That I found to be more shocking.”

Ricci said there were moments in the adult storyline “where I was just like, ‘Oh my God.’ Because I have complex trauma and PTSD, and it’s horrifying to think that I would actually give into any of it!”

When it comes to looking back, Ricci says she was most blown away by Teen Shauna’s wilderness journey, as she navigates the stages of grief from both the death of her best friend and then the death of her baby. “One of the things I was surprised by was how openly and honestly they delve into the behavior of someone like young Shauna who has gone through all this trouble and pain,” she says. “There’s no winking, there’s no apologizing. It’s just like, ‘Yeah, this is how angry this person is and how raw and how desperate.’ I found that to be really laudable and also really surprising.”

The cast doesn’t often get to interact onscreen with their counterparts. One exception was for the final scene for Lewis after Adult Nat’s death, when she met her younger self (played by Thatcher) before crossing over. In a rare occurrence, the main cast got the opportunity to pose together for a season three photoshoot, and Lyle pointed to the photos as being telling about who these characters are and how they plan to merge them together in season three. (See the photos from Vanity Fair.)

“When Liv and I got to inhabit the space together, we found ways that each side of the person is in the world. I can’t really say much more, but it was touching to me,” said Ambrose. Liv Hewson, who plays Teen Van, echoed that sentiment, telling THR, “To be able to look at Van as an adult and to know that she makes it: She grows up, she survives. As Van younger, I don’t know that Van is necessarily imagining a specific future for herself. I think she’s just hanging on for dear life. Actually, the notion that she would make it out is unthinkable to Van at this point. So to be sat next to Van as she then becomes older was really emotional. I think younger Van has so much love for Van when she’s older. An untold amount. It’s as meaningful to her that this character makes it as it is for me.”

Ricci and Hanratty were also in sync with how Misty views the world. “Misty is not someone who acknowledges her past or thinks about her future, so you’ll see we’re not acknowledge each other,” said Ricci. “She has no self-awareness and no ability to self-analyze. If she could, I think she would just forget about her younger self entirely, and I think the younger self would have no forethought about the future.” Hanratty adds, “Even though she does the caregiving position, she’s got her own stuff. She’s such an interesting person. She is very much so about the now. I liked that we were just seeing past each other because it was like: you’re not there.”

Tawny Cypress and Jasmin Savoy Brown, who play Adult and Teen Taissa, respectively, were the opposite, and essentially cradling one another. “We’re pretty much in love with each other. It’s pretty weird being in love with yourself!” Cypress joked to THR. The two Lotties also emphasized a closeness. “I’m holding onto her,” Eaton tells THR. “And you can see she [Simone] is really protective.”

But it was Thatcher who had the job of being solo, as she’s now without her counterpart after Lewis’ departure from the series. Lyle and Nickerson told THR they don’t have plans for Adult Natalie to return in any form for season three, but they said they wouldn’t rule out a spiritual visit some point down the line.

“I really feel that absence,” Thatcher tells THR, speaking about the season at large. “The death wasn’t by choice and so many times before she had tried ending it. I think there’s a line in the first episode where Melanie [Lynskey’s character, Shauna] says that she’s surprised Natalie made it pre-crash, which makes me want to cry.” Thatcher, growing emotional, pauses and continues, “I love my character so much and it’s very sad to see her gone. People feel the same way because she’s such a complex character and so many people see themselves in her.”

Natalie’s death was foreshadowed in the very first episode of Yellowjackets. When the team goes to a high school party in the woods, young Nat (Thatcher) gets high and hallucinates a vision of Misty (Hanratty) off in the distance. When speaking to THR at the time, season two finale director Karyn Kusama explained how that moment foreshadowed Misty being an angel of death for Natalie.

When they were filming that pilot scene, however, the actors weren’t privy to their showrunners’ plans.

“I remember filming it and being like, ‘Why am I here? (laughs) It’s like 3 a.m. and they’re like, ‘You’re just going to be kind of standing over there’ and I’m like, ‘OK!’” recalls Hanratty now. “But I think there’s always been this invisible string that’s pulled Misty and Natalie together. It’s not the pairing that you would think! But I think they’re always drawn to each other, whether Natalie wants it or not. There are definitely things that connect the two that will be bonding them for a lifetime that we have coming up for the rest of the season.”

Thatcher adds of the Misty-Natalie foreshadowing, “I always thought there was something else and it was more about their dynamic to come. I think it’s incredibly dark and the writers are really smart, and you never realize but they have everything planned!”

Lyle and Nickerson always knew Natalie was going to meet a tragic fate, and they said they decided when breaking season two that her time had come. It begs the question: What else have Lyle and Nickerson layered into the show that viewers will soon realize?

“[Planning Nat’s death] was pretty early in season two, and I think it will become pretty clear the way in which it was designed to not only be a big moment and a big death, but a catalyst for story moving forward in season three. I think that will become more apparent to the audience as they’re watching season three,” Lyle previously told THR.

She also revealed that the mysterious tape discovered by Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) in the season two premiere in present day was among their early pitches for the show, and will play out across the season. “There’s actually a bunch of stuff in season three that we had planned from the very beginning that were in our very early pitches. It’s so much fun to get to the point where we’re actually doing these things now,” she said.

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Yellowjackets season three releases new episodes Fridays on Paramount+, with a Showtime premiere on Sundays at 8 p.m. Follow along with THR‘s Yellowjackets coverage, including a post-premiere chat with Lyle and Nickerson.