Is Yellowjackets the safest job on TV? You’d be surprised

Once upon a time in television, a contract with a long-running series was the safest of bets. Minimum five years, assuming your modest hit could hang onto its audience. And a tidy cheque in the mail for the residuals.

Then The Sopranos came along, and changed the rules of the game. Characters started dropping dead mid-season. Not even the show’s matriarch, Livia, saw it through to the end. And then Game of Thrones turned the roll call of hits into a bloodbath.

Australian actor Liv Hewson, who plays Van in the hit series Yellowjackets, may have gamed the system. Yellowjackets, about a high-school girls’ soccer team who survived a plane crash, is told in two parallel time periods: 1996 and the present day. And with Lauren Ambrose playing the “grown up” Van, you’d think Hewson was in no danger.

“I think about it all the time,” says Hewson, laughing. “One of the most fascinating things about the structure of this show specifically is that we and the audience know ultimately, big picture, what happens.

Liv Hewson at this month’s premiere of the third season of Yellowjackets in Los Angeles.Credit: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

“We know where these characters are heading, we know where everybody ends up. We’re starting to have a sense of who dies and who lives. And it’s interesting because this show is a mystery to some degree, but also really straightforwardly laid out to another degree.”

But it’s the line in between that is complicated. “Because knowing what lies ahead doesn’t stop any level of anticipation about what happens next,” the 29-year-old says. “We know they make it back, but we don’t know how. We know some of them survive, but we don’t know what happens to the rest.”

And Van? Her relationship with Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) has survived their calamitous situation. She has been mauled by wolves. And as Taissa has leaned into the practical reality of their situation, Van has remained open to a journey of faith.

Sophie Nélisse as Teen Shauna, Vanessa Prasad as Teen Gen, Jasmin Savoy Brown as Teen Taissa, Silvana Estifanos as Teen Britt and Liv Hewson as Teen Van in Yellowjackets.Credit: Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

But she’s safe, right? “Those of us in the ’90s cast that have counterparts in the other timeline, it’s a bit of wiping sweat off your brow, a kind of job security that most actors are not afforded,” Hewson says. “And then [co-creator] Ashley Lyle once said to us, well, one of you could go for a really long walk.”

The series, which was created by Lyle and Bart Nickerson and also stars Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci, explores the aftermath of the crash. What happens next is as much about the tribalism of team sport, as it is about the complexities of human nature.

The obvious creative touchpoint is William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the 1954 novel about a group of British schoolboys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and what happens when they attempt to create a social structure. Disorganisation and personality conflicts give way to chaos, and chaos devolves into savagery.

Lord of the Flies is often wheeled out as an exploration of male behaviour, though Hewson points out that seeing it only through a gendered lens – and on the flipside, using Yellowjackets as an exploration of how young women react in the same situation – loses the more complex layers of what transpires in both stories.

“We do use [Lord of the Flies] to talk about boys and men generally, but I think that sort of misses an aspect of the book, which is that these are specifically English schoolboys and that book is as much about class and the building and breaking down of institutions as much as it is ostensibly about gender or the human condition,” Hewson says.

The season two cast of Yellowjackets (from left): Lauren Ambrose as Van, Liv Hewson as Teen Van, Steven Krueger as Ben Scott, Sophie Thatcher as Teen Natalie, Juliette Lewis as Natalie, Tawny Cypress as Taissa, Jasmin Savoy Brown as Teen Taissa, Sophie Nélisse as Teen Shauna, Melanie Lynskey as Shauna, Samantha Hanratty as Teen Misty, Christina Ricci as Misty, Kevin Alves as Teen Travis, Warren Kole as Jeff Sadecki, Simone Kessell as Lottie and Courtney Eaton as Teen Lottie.

“Similarly, this show doesn’t seek, in my mind, to say something definitive about women globally. What’s interesting is its specificity, right? It’s not just a group of young women, it’s a group of young women from North America in the ’90s who are athletes and who are at a very specific time of life. Those factors matter as much as their gender.”

Seeing through the lens of gender only, “presupposes that women do not have, or are not capable of having, the same drives and weaknesses and power struggles and complexity of human relationships,” Hewson says. “It sort of simplifies women, pedestals them, but also dehumanises them.”

At the heart of Yellowjackets, which has just begun season three, “is the repression of, and release of, anger in women, which is wonderful to play around with and explore,” Hewson says. “Being in the wilderness sort of frees these young women of societal expectations to minimise or hide or shrink their anger, their will to power, their ferocity.

Liv Hewson as Teen Van in Yellowjackets. Hewson says comparisons to Lord of the Flies are too simple.

“And then in terms of their athleticism, obviously the team dynamic is such a big part of it. These are incredibly driven, ambitious, resourceful characters who all know each other quite well and have had to work together before in circumstances that were not life and death. So once you increase the stakes, it’s interesting to watch those dynamics shift and change.”

To some extent, the rise to prominence of Van is largely thanks to Hewson’s performance. In the first season, Van was a peripheral character, with no present-day counterpart. When Lyle and Nickerson saw what Hewson was doing with the character, Van was fleshed out and, at the beginning of the second season, a present-day Van (Lauren Ambrose) entered the frame.

Yellowjackets, with Liv Hewson pictured right, explores female power and rage.

“When Lauren came on board, it was very important to me that she felt like she could bring what she wanted to bring to the character,” Hewson says. “For me, I always wanted it to be very collaborative because that’s where the real joy is. It’s a really unique opportunity to get to share a character with somebody, over a long stretch of a person’s life.”

Creatively, the preamble to the show’s third season is not overly formal. There is not, for example, a post-mortem on the preceding season. Nor is there is a formal conversation about what is to come. By and large, the cast live script to script, though this time around Hewson did have some queries.

“I found this time towards the beginning I had some questions about the season and some things I wanted to talk about, so I asked and created those opportunities to speak, which everyone was really responsive to, which is great,” Hewson says. “There’s less of a timetable of like, OK, here’s where we meet everybody and talk about everything, and it’s more of a door-knock policy.

“We, as actors in the show, don’t have complete information all the time about where the show is heading or the ways in which it will change. It is clear to me that a lot of what this show explores is how the experience these characters are having shifts and changes them. [So] there’s a lot of ripple effects out.

“It makes sense to me that at the beginning of their time in the wilderness, the horror is very literal and extreme and physical. And then as they spend more time away from other people and away from everything that they knew, the horror of their situation would become experientially more psychological and stranger and less literal over time,” Hewson says.

“That to me has always made a kind of sense because there’s the horror of being in a plane crash, which to me is distinct from the horror of not knowing if you’ll ever make it home again, and one is very physical and one is very psychological. So it’s cool to get to play around with both, and the shifting tone is exciting.”

Yellowjackets is now streaming on Paramount+

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