How Yellowjackets’ Teen Shauna Actor Changed Melanie Lynskey’s Performance

Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey discusses how she changed how she played Shauna to match Sophie Nélisse’s performance as her teenage counterpart. Lynskey and Nélisse both play Shauna Sadecki, one of the survivors of the plane crash in the Canadian wilderness. Nélisse plays the Shauna seen in sequences set in 1996, while Lynskey plays the modern-day Shauna who grapples with her actions in the past.

A straight-A student with a promising future ahead of her thanks to being accepted into Brown University, Shauna Sadecki (Nélisse) is a soccer player in the WHS Yellowjackets, a talented team of close-knit soccer players set to compete at nationals. On the way to the tournament, their plane crashes into the Canadian wilderness, resulting in the team going to unthinkable lengths to survive. In the present, an older Shauna (Lynskey) grapples with the ghosts of her past coming to haunt her and her fellow survivors. With the current day Yellowjackets cast grappling with the past that the younger cast plays out, each cast member has to match their counterparts performance to create a consistent character across the two time periods, and Lynskey has opened up about how the premise affected her performance.

Speaking to Indiewire, Lynskey discussed how Nélisse’s performance influenced her own portrayal of the present-day portrayal of Shauna. Lynskey explained that Nélisse’s portrayal is more confident and that Lynskey took it on herself to tone down her own mannerisms to help closer align with her 1996 counterpart. Describing Nélisse’s portrayal as being more cooler and less reliant on hand gestures, Lynskey stated that she tried to have more of a stillness to her performance to match her younger counterpart’s confident, more self-assured performance. Check out Lynskey’s response below.

“There’s ways that [Nélisse as Shauna] carries herself that are very confident, and it’s something that I don’t naturally do. Like, I had a director tell me, ‘You look like you’re apologizing with your hands when you’re acting,’ in an audition, and since then I’ve been sort of self-conscious about it. And [Shauna] is not a character who would be apologizing with her hands. And Sophie doesn’t apologize with her hands. So I was trying to have more of a stillness than I usually would and trying to just inhabit some of this fierceness that Sophie has. It’s really, really cool.”

With their time in the wilderness pushing the surviving Yellowjackets beyond their limits, characters like Shauna commit horrific acts, intentionally and accidentally, such as the tragic death of Jackie (Ella Purnell). With moral lines being crossed and death being a very real, ever-present danger, what they did in the wilderness will have long-lasting ramifications reflected by the cast in the present day. Lynskey’s Shauna was hardened by her time in the wilderness, and she questions how things could have been different if the team had simply chosen a different path. At the same time, the surviving Yellowjackets must also do what’s necessary to keep what was done in the wilderness a secret, even if lives must be taken. This can be seen with the death of Adam in Yellowjackets episode 9, which forces Shauna to forgo what could be a way to recapture the life she thought she’d lost.

Yellowjackets is a standout series in recent years due to its unique simultaneous plotlines between the team’s survival in 1996 and the ramifications they tackle in 2021. The show isn’t simply handling one cast, it’s handling multiple versions of the same characters. While they may change in the time between each period, audiences still have to see some consistency between the two characters. As such, hearing how Lynskey adjusted her own performance to match Nélisse shows how much work had to be put in, while they may not share a scene, the two stars must work together to create a fully-realized representation of Shauna on-screen.

Source: Indiewire

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