‘Yellowjackets’ Cast Says Season 3 Embraces The Wilderness

The third season of Yellowjackets kicks off with a hunt. That shouldn’t surprise longtime fans of the Showtime survivalist thriller – which returns to our small screens on Feb. 14th. After all, its protagonists are fueled by hormones and bloodlust and the kind of cutthroat competitive drive that can only be forged in the locker room of a high school girl’s soccer team. But this time, the prize at the end of the race isn’t the crispy flesh of one of their teammates, it’s something more wholesome… which makes all the biting and screaming and scheming that much more terrifying.

Sometimes, the worst kinds of horrors happen in broad daylight, and Yellowjackets seems intent on testing that theory this time around.

To recap – because it has been two years since the show wrapped its second season – the Emmy nominated series’ second season, a messy, claustrophobic gore-fest set in the dead of winter, was darker, even more barbaric, than its first, taking big swings but ultimately getting bogged down by an unfocused narrative that lacked the stamina to straddle decades.

Season three – we’ve seen the first four episodes – still proves to be a showcase for its younger cast with the teen survivors running wild, quite literally, as they build their own civilization, with all its rules and rituals, via twig-fortified huts and antler headdresses. But their fucked-up version of summer camp bleeds into something more sinister in the present as Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Misty (Christina Ricci), Lottie (Simone Kessell), Tai (Tawny Cypress), and Van (Lauren Ambrose) battle paranoia and a sneaking suspicion that the “wilderness” – that sentient, mystical deity that turned their teenage selves into its own murderous avatars – has somehow followed them home.

In many ways, the show’s third season has tapped into its roots; bigger conspiracy theories take a backseat to the brutal political machinations of teenagers who prove hierarchies aren’t confined to high school halls and the line between mysticism and mental illness is blurred further as storylines in the past and present become tainted by the supernatural. It also gives its older stars something meatier to chew, keeping things interesting as the grown-ups become more unsettled by the mundanity of “normal” life.

We chatted with some of the cast to preview this season’s biggest surprises, most shocking deaths, and most pressing questions. Here’s what to remember – and what to know – in their words.

Back To The Wilderness

Sophie Thatcher, who plays Young Nat, and Sammi Hanratty, who plays Young Misty, told us season three’s change of scenery altered the vibe on set in interesting ways.

“Last season, we were on a quiet studio stage and it was hard to not over fixate on things,” Thatcher explains. With the team’s cabin swallowed up by flames that may or may not have been started by their missing adult supervisor (they’re looking for you, Coach Scott), the cast and crew went back on location to where they shot season one, building a kind of DIY utopia for these feral teens to eventually destroy. “I feel like a better actor when I’m outside, in the elements,” Thatcher continues. “I had a day where I was just napping inside my hut. I actually treated it like my home. There was so much beauty in that first season and it was so cool going back to that feeling of immersion.”

Hanratty, who surprised her castmates with a pregnancy announcement ahead of season three’s shoot, had a different take. “It’s not my favorite, running on twigs that are all uneven while trying to protect the belly,” she joked. But both actresses referenced a sequence in episode four that the cast shot outside, one that proves pivotal for the group’s storyline in the past. “There’s nothing like nights while we’re filming,” Hanratty teased. “There’s an eeriness about it, especially when we’re doing some crazy shit. It’s like, ‘Wow, we’re really doing it.’ It feels so much more real when we’re out in the wilderness.”

And while Lynskey wasn’t traipsing around the forest with her younger co-stars, she did reveal she reads all of her younger counterpart, Sophie Nélisse’s, scripts, and some seasons-spanning questions do get answered this time around.

“There’s a lot of very shocking moments and there are also a lot of answers in a way that I found personally very satisfying,” she says. “There’s one particular wilderness storyline that I think is so exciting and so unexpected and fun.”

Moving On From Natalie’s Death

One of the most shocking twists on the show so far was Juliette Lewis’ surprise exit at the end of season two. When Misty, Van, Shauna, and Tai confronted Lottie at her cult compound, Natalie got caught in the crosshairs, cosplaying as a pin cushion for Misty’s fentanyl-filled syringe. And everyone – the characters and the cast – is still reeling from the loss in season three. Ricci and Lynskey have both admitted to missing Lewis’ presence on set with Ricci diving into how Nat’s death is fueling Misty’s storyline in the present.

“Like a lot of trauma survivors and people with PTSD, she’s having trouble connecting with her emotions,” the actress explains. “Her whole life has been moving forward and overcoming these very intense things that she went through as a child. So she can’t connect to her grief as we see in the first episode or so. When she finally is able to, she starts to confront her friendships and some realities that I think everyone’s been aware of. It’s been really fun to see.”

Lynskey warns though that audiences won’t have much room to grieve Nat as the pace picks up this season.

“I have a very hard time processing when there’s any kind of death on the show. So for me, I could use a beat before then you have to go through another one, but that’s not how the season is going. It’s been like one thing after another.”

A New Threat Emerges

Speaking of processing trauma, the Sadeckis are struggling to cope with the fallout from season two. Murder, mayhem, and witnessing your matriarch get chased down by homicidal housewives in animal masks does not a happy household make. Shauna’s anger is closer to the surface than ever with Lynskey teasing she’s ready to “fuck shit up,” while her daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins in a series regular role, finally) is relentless in her pursuit of the truth.

“Callie’s trying to understand what’s going on so she can understand her mom, and so she can understand herself,” Desjardins explains. “There’s the whole aspect of nature versus nurture. ‘Am I like her? How much am I like her? How do I feel about the fact that I might be like her?’ I feel like Callie’s in a very different place to where her parents are at, and it’s kind of forcing her to mature and almost step into an adult role. In some moments it seems like nobody else is going to do it.”

Certainly not her dad Jeff. Warren Kole’s been playing the perfect TV himbo for two seasons now but the events of season three might just push Shauna’s ride or die to the breaking point. “He’s proving to be quite egocentric in how he’s handling things,” Kole says, adding he still doesn’t know when “enough is enough for someone like Jeff to let go of his loyalties, to release that, accept the realities of the situation and maybe protect his daughter a little better than he’s been doing. To change his priorities a little bit.”

“There’s a real sadistic pleasure in exploring that,” he adds.

And a surprise visit from Lottie, fresh from the loony bin and ready to stir a bit more chaos, doesn’t help the family in finding a bit of normalcy. The show’s resident “Goop sorceress” is reeling from the loss of her community and harboring a strange interest in Shauna’s daughter.

“We’re seeing Lottie in a completely different headspace this season,” Kessell says. “She’s a lone wolf. She’s on her own sort of self-destructive mission She sees something in Callie that I think harks back to their time in the wilderness, a fragility and a darkness that’s taking her back to a time which was so primal and so authentic. I think that’s what Lottie is searching for and that becomes so weird and twisted.”

Their strange, shared bond poses a threat to Shauna’s control over her family, deepening the rift between her and her daughter as yet another face from the past pops up to heighten her paranoia. “She’s really doing her best to move beyond it and be a normal person, but she’s still so angry,” Lynskey says. “I think Shauna has a lot of resentment towards Lottie because her child that died, that was the greatest trauma of her life, was taken by this weird cult and used as this kind of symbol of something, this mystical being. She doesn’t feel like she got the chance to grieve in the way that she wanted or needed to. So now here she is in the present day and here Lottie comes again, trying to get this baby.”

The supernatural has stayed on the fringes in the present timeline so far, but in season three it’s a driving force, reminding the older Yellowjackets of the pact with the wilderness they made all those years ago. Whether their circumstances are pushing them to do evil things, or whether the evil was within them all along, is the central thread that connects the past and present this season and the show’s biggest strength is in exploring that thorny question of human nature and its destructive limits.

Cypress admits to wanting to have the audience “crying and throwing up” while watching the series. From what we’ve seen, season three achieves that and then some.