One of Melanie Lynskey’s latest roles harks back to Heavenly Creatures while another has her married to Leonardo DiCaprio. by RUSSELL BAILLIE
Melanie Lynskey doesn’t mind her past catching up with her. It has helped her role in Yellowjackets, the chilling new series about 1990s American teenagers doing terrible things. She plays Shauna, a New Jersey wife and mother, who, as an adolescent, spent 19 months in the Canadian wilderness after the plane carrying her champion highschool soccer team crashed on the way to a national final.
Now, 25 years later, the trauma and guilt are being revisited upon Shauna and her surviving teammates, who have stayed silent about what really happened. Teens doing terrible things is what got Lynskey started. While still at high school in New Plymouth, she was cast as Pauline Parker in Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s acclaimed 1994 dramatisation of the Parker-Hulme matricide case in 1950s Christchurch, which paired Lynskey with Kate Winslet as Juliet Hulme. At about the same time, Lynskey’s Yellowjackets’ cast mates, Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci, were also getting known in Hollywood movies from the dark side.
The show’s creators, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, were fans of Lynskey’s debut and it figured in their casting, Lynskey says via Zoom from Atlanta, where she’s working on another show. “I know they were mindful of my and Juliette and Christina’s screen personas when we were teenagers, and how we all did stuff that was edgy and dangerous and dark. So there is a little part of people’s minds that’s like, ‘Oh, I saw this person when they were a teenager and they were scary.’ That was something that they were consciously looking for in the casting.”
The younger Shauna is played by French-Canadian actress Sophie Nélisse, whose extensive list of credits includes the lead role in 2013’s The Book Thief. “I think I’ve won the lottery with my younger me,” says Lynskey. “When I first saw the pilot, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s doing 75% of the work of the character’. She’s so good.” They may not have many scenes together until late in the series, but Lynskey bonded with Lewis, Ricci and Tawny Cypress, who plays Taissa, another crash survivor who’s now an aspiring politician. Although Covid restrictions during filming made socialising diffi cult, there were long group chats via the Marco Polo app.
“We shared everything: our family histories, our past relationships, our experiences working as teenagers, which actors are shitty, which actresses we’re jealous of. We got to know each other on a deep level, so that when we were in scenes together, there was an intimacy.” Sounds like the makings of a great book … although one possibly requiring a lawyer.
“Sure, if I transcribed all these Marco Polos, I’d have a bestseller, but Juliette alone would be scary enough to make me not do it.” Shauna may be the first time Lynskey has played a former teen sports champ plane-crash survivor. But with the 2015-16 HBO dramedy Togetherness and other roles, it’s not the fi rst time she has played an unhappily – or only moderately happily – married woman.
“I’ve thought about that a lot because I started doing it a long time ago. Judging by what people say to me, I think there’s something that’s relatable, which may be due to the fact that I’m not a very thin person and I haven’t done any Botox or anything. “So it’s kind of easy casting. But I’m not going out there saying, ‘Give me the unhappy housewife!’” And, of course, this frequent middle-America everywoman is from New Plymouth.
“It’s funny. I’m so from New Plymouth. People here are confused when they meet me and I talk and I sound like myself.” Lynskey, who is married to actor Jason Ritter, with whom she has a two-year-old daughter, has based her career in the US for much of the past two decades. She has bounced between sitcoms, including a 10-years-plus recurring role as kooky Rose on Two and Half Men, indie movies and supporting parts in bigger movies such as Up in the Air, in which she was the sister of George Clooney’s character. She was Matt Damon’s missus in The Informant! In her latest fi lm, Don’t Look Up, she’s the wife of Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Randall Mindy, an astronomer trying to warn the world about a doomsday comet but gets caught in a media and political vortex. It’s a black comedy with an environmental undercurrent, by Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short). It also stars Jennifer Lawrence as another astronomer, Meryl Streep as the US president and Cate Blanchett as a news anchor. Lynskey’s June Mindy is there, says McKay, as moral backbone.
“I love how Melanie radiates this feisty decency. Even though she’s an extremely gift ed actor, I can’t ever imagine Melanie telling a lie, which is why she was perfect for June Mindy. Her husband goes on such a journey of self-deception and moral zigzagging it was important that Melanie’s character see right through Randall Mindy at all times.”
In the new show she’s filming in Atlanta, she’s back in nasty suburbia. In the untitled truecrime drama, she plays Betty Gore, a woman murdered with an axe by her fellow churchgoer Candy Montgomery in Dallas in 1980. Jessica Biel plays Montgomery, who was having an aff air with Gore’s husband. “Yeah, nice and light,” she says with a laugh. “It’s a really interesting story of women in the suburbs in the 80s. Feminism kind of missed them.”
Yellowjackets screens on Soho (Sundays 9.30pm) and is streaming on Neon. Don’t Look Up is in cinemas now and will stream on Netfl ix from December 24.