‘Yellowjackets’ Stars Introduce the Teen & Adult Versions of the Plane Crash Survivors
Preview
In the new Showtime drama, when a plane carrying a soccer team crashes in the wilderness, the players must figure out how to survive. As you can imagine, things get wild — but it doesn’t stop there.
Yellowjackets follows two timelines: that of the plane crash and nearly 25 years later, to see how those who did survive have put their lives back together (or at least tried to). And everything that the survivors did as they went from a soccer team (the Yellowjackets) to savage clans is about to come back to haunt them. The adults have begun receiving postcards, with a symbol on the back that indicates someone knows the truth about what happened out there — and everything they may want to stay buried is about to come clawing to the surface.
The stars who portray the teen and adult versions of Natalie Scatorccio (Sophie Thatcher and Juliette Lewis), Taissa Turner (Jasmin Savoy Brown and Tawny Cypress), Shauna Sadecki (Sophie Nélisse and Melanie Lynskey), and Misty Quigley (Samantha Hanratty and Christina Ricci) introduce their characters and tease how they’ll be handling the mystery of those postcards below.
Yellowjackets, Series Premiere, Sunday, November 14, 10/9c, Showtime
Teen Natalie Scatorccio (Sophie Thatcher)
Natalie has a different background than the rest of the team. As a result, once the plane crashes, “she takes on the role as the huntress and that gives her purpose and it keeps her going and it helps her to some extent it calms some darkness in her mind, because she’s just focused on surviving,” Thatcher explains. “She’s already been in that mindset to some extent her entire life, but now it’s just heightened.”
Expect to see her connect with Travis (Kevin Alves), who “brings out a different vulnerability that she wasn’t used to,” because “they’re both loners and they both have difficult upbringings.”
Adult Natalie Scatorccio (Juliette Lewis)
When we meet Natalie in the present-day, she’s on her way home to face people. “We don’t really know why, or what she’s up to and what she’s after. She’s a lost soul,” Lewis says. However, “she’s actually the most sane of all of them. [She has] addiction issues, a little bit of criminality. All her pain and stuff is all there at the surface. She’s not really a liar, [whereas] the others have huge masks of conformity in society.”
And so when the postcards begin arriving, “there’s a strength in her not-giving-an-F attitude,” she explains. “The others have so much to lose — one running in politics, another trying to keep up a family world — and they don’t want things known and the postcards [indicate] a potential blackmail situation.”
Teen Taissa Turner (Jasmin Savoy Brown)
Taissa is “practical” after the plane crashes, Brown says. “She wants to survive and is going to do what it takes to survive and use her brains to do that. She’s not dwelling on sadness or hope or any negative feelings or any positive feelings either. It’s just ‘this is what we have to do, this is what makes sense if we’re going to get out of here, follow me because I know the best way to go.'”
As you’d expect, the soccer team formed “a deep, deep bond” as a result of their shared trauma. “Maybe it was a little bit too deep that they had to put some distance between them,” she suggests.
Adult Taissa Turner (Tawny Cypress)
That practicality and the need for order continues for Taissa as an adult “in this idyllic family that she’s put together, this idyllic house that she’s building for her family, and this fairy tale dream of holding an elected seat,” according to Cypress. “It all stems from her need for perfection, her need to be right, and competitive desire.”
As a result, “I think she forgets it that there may be consequences to her actions [like what happened in the wilderness]. She’s been quiet, she got comfortable so now she can move forward with what she wants out of life, which is power,” she admits. And so when the postcards start, “her world is starting to crumble. She holds it together as best she can for as long as you can. She can’t have the past come back, especially running for office, so that is definitely the beginning of the end for her.”
Teen Shauna Sadecki (Sophie Nélisse)
“She handles it pretty well, better than she thought actually,” Nélisse says of Shauna in the wilderness. Before, she was “a little shy, kind of Jackie’s [Ella Purnell] sidekick,” but after, “she steps into her own and finds her voice and slowly finds this inner confidence that she had inside of her all this time.”
Expect to see Shauna’s relationships “shift,” she continues. In this situation, “you don’t have anything else but your true self to offer, and through hard times and when you’re at your worst and your lowest, that’s when you start bonding with people that you didn’t think you would bond with. Some [people] will grow apart and some grow even stronger together.”
Adult Shauna Sadecki (Melanie Lynskey)
For adult Shauna, “every choice she makes once she is either rescued or returns home, whatever happens, is informed by what happened, the guilt that she still carries with her, the person she became out there,” Lynskey shares. “She has a lot of internalized rage and a real dark streak that I kind of loved and was also terrified of.”
While she’s buried that trauma and hasn’t seen the others, that all changes with the postcards … though she did not receive one. “She really wants to find out who’s behind it,” Lynskey teases. “I think she’s panicking and she’s going to obsess about it until she figures out what’s going on. She won’t be f**ked with.”
Teen Misty Quigley (Samantha Hanratty)
Outsider Misty, the Yellowjackets’ equipment manager, is “actually thriving in the wilderness,” Hanratty shares. “For the first time ever, she is being needed and is knowledgeable and can help others and starts to feel that sense of belonging that she’s always wanted, and she will do anything and everything to keep that power.”
In fact, for the first time, people are talking about her behind her back in a positive way. “She’s never been important to [the team] the way that they’ve been important to her,” she explains. “That really just changes everything for her.” What also changes: She now has power over Coach Ben Scott (Steven Krueger) in a way she hasn’t, and yes, she’s “definitely having some feels” towards him.
Adult Misty Quigley (Christina Ricci)
While the crash ended up being “the greatest time in her life” for teen Misty, “she’s given the wrong version of what she’s always wanted, and that leads her for the rest of her life to really seek out that version of happiness and fulfillment,” Ricci explains. “When we see her as an adult she really is somebody waiting for this kind of thing, this moment, this power to come back into her life.”
So she’s “thrilled” when the postcards arrive “because it means that it’s starting again.” And unlike some of the others, she doesn’t have anything to lose. “I don’t think she has any genuine interest anymore in love or intimacy or connection,” Ricci says. “She doesn’t care if everybody knows [what happened in the wilderness]. In some ways that gives her so much power over the others because they’re terrified and she’s not.”
