Yellowjackets, Last of Us star Melanie Lynskey on why it’s golden era for older women in Hollywood

Melanie Lynskey, the star of Yellowjackets and The Last of Us, on the cannibal hit and why actresses no longer have an expiry date.

Melanie Lynskey stars in The Last of Us. Picture: HBO Max/Binge

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes but, well, Melanie Lynskey is a newly inaugurated one – more fool me for allowing it to take so long for the penny to drop. Yet I suspect, in the UK at least, I’m not alone. Despite a 30-year acting career, which began with her stupendous performance opposite Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures – Peter Jackson’s 1994 film about murderous friends - and has taken in hit US shows such as Two and a Half Men, Mrs America and Young Sheldon, the New Zealand actress is still not a household name. Although it’s possible that your household has better taste than mine.

That is all changing because of Yellowjackets, the Showtime series on Paramount+ that became a lockdown hit when it aired at the end of 2021 and which has earned Lynskey an Emmy nomination. The drama, created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, follows a New Jersey high school soccer team made up of teenage girls who, in 1996, crash land in the Canadian wilderness on their way to a tournament in Seattle. They remain lost for 19 months. To survive they must do the unthinkable (hint: you will never look at a barbecue in the same way again).

Lynskey, 45, is speaking to me on Zoom from the “guest bedroom” of the house in Los Angeles where she lives with her husband, the actor Jason Ritter, and their four-year-old daughter. Until a month ago, they were all in Vancouver where she was shooting Yellowjackets (“My husband has been prioritising my career”), and before that in Calgary, a city she raves about, filming her significant role in The Last of Us (Ritter also had a cameo as a zombie “clicker”). So they are only just settling back in. The walls of the room are lined with grey and white flowery paper and she wears a baby pink cashmere jumper. It looks homely, cosy and, well, clean … a long way from the rabbit-skin rags, bloody hunts and cult rituals of Yellowjackets.

The show, intended to run for five series, flips between the 1990s and the near-present day. Lynskey plays the adult Shauna, the New Jersey housewife she never wanted to be as an ambitious youth. Young Shauna, a smart, ambitious student, is played superbly by the Canadian actress Sophie Nelisse, who dyes her hair and wears brown contacts to better resemble Lynskey. Among those who join Lynskey in the “adult” scenes are Juliette Lewis as haggard punky addict Natalie, Tawny Cypress as wannabe senator Taissa and Christina Ricci as creepy misfit Misty, whose first-aid skills saved so many lives after the crash. The brilliance of the show is that we are not told who has survived in one go but are drip-fed knowledge.

The writing is top notch, the storytelling artfully controlled without skimping on fun. The female characters have depth. Shauna may be a housewife but she is smart as a button, straight-talking and very sexy. “I loved Shauna doing a pile of ironing and getting every question right in the TV quiz,” Lynskey says of her memory of reading the very first script. “I am the mother of a toddler, I work all the time, I am constantly so tired . . . I read one [script] on the floor of my closet and couldn’t wait to read the next episode, and that is such a good sign for me.”

It has been described as a cross between Alive, the brutal 1993 film about the Uruguayan rugby team who crashed in the Andes and had to turn cannibal to survive, and Stranger Things (there are supernatural elements and a terrific pop soundtrack). But in truth, it is its own show. The long-awaited second season dropped last month. “Autumn was just an appetiser,” teases the tagline.

An early scene with teenage Shauna in the first of the new episodes is likely to make the more delicate choke on their popcorn. Meanwhile, Lynskey’s older Shauna, with Misty’s tuition, must wriggle free from accusations that she murdered her lover, Adam. The New Zealand actress Simone Kessell joins as an adult Lottie, a cult leader who, as a teenager, ran out of her schizophrenia medication in the wilds. Elijah Wood (Lord of the Rings), with whom Lynskey starred in the thriller I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore six years ago, is excellent as Walter, a citizen detective.

Melanie Lynskey earned new fans with her performances in Yellowjackets and The Last of Us.

Lynskey’s newly acquired young fan base has had another boost owing to her role as Kathleen, a ruthless leader of a resistance group in The Last of Us, the hit apocalyptic zombie drama based on the video game (the first six episodes have been watched by more than 30 million). The first series has just wound up, but, along with the newly garlanded stars Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, she is still in the hearts of those who adored it. And, it’s been announced that she is to play a leading role in The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a movie adaptation of the Holocaust novel by the New Zealand writer Heather Morris.

Lynskey agrees that this is a golden time for her and there are more meaty roles for older women. “The world has really opened up for actors in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and there is rich and wonderful work to have. It is very different to in the 1990s, having an expiration date and panicking about not being on the trajectory we thought we would be,” she says, in a soft New Zealand accent. Most of her roles call for an American one - dialects are a speciality. Recently, her impersonation of Drew Barrymore on Jimmy Kimmel Live! went viral. “The main thing I have noticed is that there is so much more diversity in every way,” she says.

By that, Lynskey means more women and people of colour in front of and behind the camera, but also, I think, that there are different body shapes on screen. The actress, who had an eating disorder earlier in her career, is slimmer than the average woman but, gratifyingly, not your usual Hollywood beanpole. As you would hope, it hasn’t influenced any casting decisions of late, but a recent social media post referencing Lynskey’s body forced her to retaliate. “Her body says life of luxury … not post-apocalyptic warlord,” a Last of Us fan complained of Kathleen. Lynskey, one of the few stars who still posts on Twitter, responded elegantly: “I don’t need to be muscly. That’s what henchmen are for.”

No matter, Lynskey says, she has had more praise than criticism for that performance. “The Last of Us has been overwhelmingly positive. There are still some video game bros who are mad about it,” she says. She sighs. “Sometimes I understand that if I don’t engage, it goes away quicker. It’s not that I was horribly bullied as a child but I was made fun of and was shy, and so there is part of me now that is, ‘I will say something back’. I have a thing about bullies; I don’t think they should be allowed to get away with it.”

Being able to speak her mind on set has never been an issue. “I have always been able to be pretty strong.” Her dog is named Mouse and later she tells me she is loath to act on stage because she has a “voice like a mouse”. But this is clearly a mouse who roars.

And it turns out that England has a little something to do with her fighting spirit. When she was six, her family moved from their home in New Plymouth, on the West Coast of New Zealand’s north island, to London for a year. Her father, an orthopaedic surgeon, was posted to the UK. It was where she acted for the first time. “I was having such a hard time, I was always the new kid at school. We had a year in London, my accent was funny, I was painfully shy.”

She struggles with recalling details from her childhood and can’t place where in London she lived or the name of the school, only that she wore “a little uniform” and that she was miserable until she auditioned for a play. “I got a few lines. I do remember the feeling of being on stage and that my self dropped away and this freedom: I am not me, I can be confident. And I became addicted.”

On returning to New Zealand she did any acting she could. Voices quickly became her thing. “I came back with a little English accent and I did not try to get rid of it. I was already the weird kid, so let’s make the most of it.” The eldest of five – three boys and two girls – her home was noisy and busy, and she had her work cut out. “My parents were so young and overwhelmed. I had a lot of responsibility for the other kids (as the eldest),” she says.

Then at high school, a casting director visited and her life changed. She was cast as Pauline Parker in Jackson’s film about the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, opposite Kate Winslet. Lynskey was 14, Winslet 16. I ask her how she sees that time now. “I don’t think I will ever feel something like that again,” she says, shaking her head. “There are wonderful experiences where you feel so at home … We stayed very close. Most jobs I come away with a lifelong friend, which is lovely, but there has never been anything like that bond with Kate and the depth: we loved each other.” Jackson has written that the pair continued in character after the cameras stopped rolling.

Lynskey turned 16 in the last week of filming and spent a year and a half studying for a degree in English literature at Victoria University in Wellington, but found it tricky. “I was still so close with Kate and seeing her trajectory, obviously I had the understanding of how special she was, so I wasn’t, ‘that should be me!’, but I just wanted to be working.

“I was playing the lead in this film doing very, very intense, difficult stuff, which I loved. So to not know if that was to happen ever again was tough. I was 19 when I did my next movie.”

That movie was the 1999 adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. She was cast as Dunyasha alongside Charlotte Rampling and Alan Bates. She dropped out of college and hasn’t stopped working since. “Thirty years I have been a working actor and praying there will be another job, and it’s hard now to be offered things and say, ‘actually, I will take a little break’.

She laughs. “This is not what I thought my career would look like.”

Perhaps – please, no! – if Shauna died it might open up her diary. The Yellowjackets death count is alarmingly high. “I think a lot of people have been surprised,” she says. “One actor, when we were shooting the finale, was like, ‘I really thought this was going to be the one where I went’. I feel on shaky ground, I feel I could go. They have to do what’s best for the story. I would be devastated.” She’s not the only one.

The Last of Us is streaming on Foxtel and Binge. Yellowjackets is streaming on Paramount+.