Yahoo News Are The Teenage ‘Yellowjackets’ Almost Out Of The Woods? “Not Just Yet,” Says Sophie Nélisse – Contenders TV
Today at Deadline’s Contenders TV, Yellowjackets‘ Sophie Nélisse was asked if we can expect the Showtime series’ young leads to make it out of the woods any time soon.
“Not just yet. It’s all downhill from here,” said the actress, who plays pregnant teenage plane crash survivor, Shauna. “Like, it doesn’t get any better. It just gets worse. Sorry.”
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When asked by moderator Lynette Rice if the cannibalism promised in Season 1, which is finally introduced at the beginning of Season 2, is just one of the worries facing Shauna and her soccer teammates stranded out in the woods, she couldn’t say for sure. “We don’t really know,” Nélisse admitted, “but I don’t think it’s going to look pretty in Season 3.”
The second season of the Emmy-nominated drama, created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, watches as the (un)lucky surviving members of team Yellowjackets struggle to survive an Ontario winter, without much hope that anyone is coming to save them. While chronicling the team’s descent from a complicated but thriving group to warring, cannibalistic clans, the show continues to track the lives the team members have attempted to piece back together nearly 25 years later.
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Nélisse was joined on today’s panel by her Emmy-nominated co-star Melanie Lynskey, who plays the adult version of Shauna, as well as Oscar-nominated director Liz Garbus, who came aboard the series for one Season 2 episode after becoming enthralled with the series in its first go-round. Among other topics discussed were a couple of Nélisse’s most memorable scenes from the first half of Season 2 — one of those, of course, being that in which Shauna and her starving peers eat Shauna’s recently deceased best friend, Jackie (Ella Purnell).
The actress described a sense of excitement to tackle the scene, knowing it would be “very challenging” and totally unlike anything she’d done before. Of course, the shoot was also incredibly disconcerting, given that the ‘body’ they were eating looked “way too much” like Purnell. “It was disturbing,” she said, “and doing the scene, it was really hard for us to disassociate.” Nélisse admitted, in the same breath, that the edible stand-in for Jackie’s corpse was actually “kind of delicious,” consisting of fried rice papers and jackfruit — or “Jackiefruit,” as she joked with her castmates.
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Produced for Showtime by eOne, Yellowjackets also stars Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, Warren Kole, Samantha Hanratty, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Steven Krueger, Simone Kessell, Courtney Eaton, Lauren Ambrose, Liv Hewson, Kevin Alves and more. Lyle, Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco serve as showrunners and are joined as EPs on the series by pilot director Karyn Kusama and Creative Engine’s Drew Comins.
Check back Tuesday for our panel video on Yellowjackets, which has already been renewed for a third season.
Deadline Contenders Television is sponsored by Apple TV+, Coverfly, Eyepetizer, Final Draft, Los Siete Misterios, Michter’s, and Village Roadshow Entertainment. Partners include: Four Seasons Resort Maui, The American Pavilion, Julia Wong Designs and Pampring.
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