‘Yellowjackets’: Melanie Lynskey and Warren Kole on Fragile Marriage in Season 2 – The Hollywood Reporter

[This story contains spoilers from the third episode of Yellowjackets season two, “DIGESTIF.”]

There’s a moment in the latest event yellowjackets when Jeff (Warren Kole) asks Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) a question he doesn’t want an answer to.

“How the heck did the first one get back?”

The third episode of the hit show’s series in several sequels is the thread of the story of the adult characters who are after a terrible cannibal festival in the past. That moment, which saw the crash survivor eating dead teammate Jackie in hopes of survival in the bleak winter desert, is among the many sources of trauma for adult characters on the show today, and none more so than Shauna.

The season two episode “DIGESTIF” (who needs help digesting a big dinner), was written by Rich Monahan, Sarah L. Thompson and Ameni Rozsa and directed by Jeffrey W. Byrd. By the time Shauna reached adulthood, the trauma had so skillfully bubbled to the surface.

She first encounters a corpse who tries to steal her family’s minivan at gunpoint, much to her husband Jeff’s horror. But when the car is being hunted to be brought back, the vision of his younger self returns.

As he shows the gun to the man who has his car, he tells him to shake his hand because of how bad it is he wants to shoot him. “Have you ever pulled the skin off a human body?” he will ask “It’s not as easy as you think. It’s really stuck in us, the skin. You just have to roll the edges, so you can really get a pretty good grip. Which again is not easy. People are always so hot when they kill them. Just like the oil. See, people get it.” when they feel they are going to die. This is one thing.”

It’s a chilling scene, as it has taken a different turn now that viewers have seen what Shauna and the team can do to survive in the desert. What’s even more chilling is how quickly he wipes himself off – with one of Shauna’s signature quirky shrugs – when Jeff later asks how he got the minivan back. Jeff remains a rhetorical question and the audience is left to assume that Jeff takes whatever Shauna says (words or body language) at face value and accepts everything in return.

“They’re in this strange place where they finally know they can love unconditionally,” Lynskey tells us. Hollywood actor curious about himself yellowjackets marriage “That he reads the newspapers, that he knows everything, I think it’s so horrible that he’s like, ‘Well, someone can know everything about me and still love me?’

It’s revealed for the first time that Jeff has read Shauna’s journal from her time in the desert, and when he sees what happened at Jackie’s party now, he realizes what a big deal it is. Especially with the added layer that Shauna and Jeff’s teenage affair, behind Jackie’s back, was the main source of the final fight brewing that prompted Jackie to sleep in the cold and freeze to death overnight.

“Shauna is just the girl for him, and he can’t resist her,” explains Kole THR of what Jeff is quoted as being so absolute. “She cannot be resisted at all. He loves her madly. Faithful, unto death, to this woman. And they have been partners in crime from the beginning. Right when it comes back, they got this common fault. Since there are anniversaries at Jackie’s house this year in a timely manner — this annual self-flagellation they impose on themselves in penance for their sins, perhaps Jackie’s death — is common ground. he knows how exceptional he is; He knows that he is happy. And prop-ter him, that he may know that she is his wife. So she will take the newspapers.

But Shauna and Jeff handle things differently. As Lynskey says, “Shauna is so far behind in editing. They and the files themselves come later. Meanwhile, Jeff is only beginning to scratch the surface of Shauna’s trauma, which remains ever-present now 25 years after the plane crash. The matter is already interposed with the murder of Adam (Petri Gadiot), which therefore repels her husband while he tries to fight her over it.

“I think there was a moment at the end of the last season where she started to realize what it means to have an understanding that knows everything she knows. [from reading the journals] and it’s like, ‘I can’t feel the emotions around all of them yet,’” says Lynskey. “It’s just thrown in, and then it’s like, ‘But hang on, I have some questions about this.’ It’s kind of like, Oh God. You had a moment and then I’m still apologizing and feeling guilty and crappy about it. But he tries to agree when he gets more information about how scary and dangerous it is. And he also has a new respect for himself because he’s done something crazy with shit and he knows he’s not boring and that’s fun. Yes, really some to know themselves.

Despite her guilt about what happened to Adam, the fact that she and Jeff have this big secret really brings her back to the youth that was in the desert, a place that shocked many of the surviving adults who fight. that the teenagers were in the wilderness to live.

“She has a lot of guilt about killing Adam. But there’s also something about the danger and almost being caught and all the craziness that gets so drunk on her and she’s like, ‘Oh hang on, this is me’. Suddenly I know myself again. I look in the mirror and I’m like, there it is ,” says Lynskey, recognizing her younger self, who is played by Sophie Nélisse in the 1996 timeline. “Yes, Shauna just pushes, pushes boundaries. There is no end to the time limit. It kind of veers away from that because there’s so much else going on, but it’s definitely pushing it for a while.

And no matter how hard he drives, Kole says Jeff (who is now an accessory to Adam’s murder) is pretty much one for the car.

“He’s not the most complicated person, but he’s being questioned as a very complicated subject, emotionally and intellectually,” says Kole as the local police begin to investigate Adam’s murder. “So maybe it means something, to a mature version of him and throw an occasional tantrum. But I would like to think that his actions speak volumes for the fact that he does not run away; he asks, damn it! For better or for worse. “

Then he offers this trouble about which ride in his minivan he’s going to see the two of them at the right time: “As Shauna continues to renew this manifestation, which she’s only read in her journal — Shauna’s bigger and darker attacks — He’s a good man, but he’s fragile. And he’s really proven to be going down into a very dark and violent place.

yellowjackets It airs new episodes weekly on Fridays for Showtime subscribers and airs on cable Sundays at 9 p.m. THR‘s yellowjackets at the time of the two coverage and interviews.