Trivia / Yellowjackets

• Acting in the Dark:
  • The entire main cast gets their scripts episode per episode, in order to avoid leaks. Only Melanie Lynskey was granted an exception since she convinced the producers that knowing where things were going was crucial to her acting process and even then she was only given a vague outline of Season 1.
  • Ella Purnell was the only one who was told that Jackie would die in the Season 1 finale.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • The idea of Misty having taken the Red Cross training for baby sitters (twice!) came from Samantha Hanratty, who plays her as a teen. Per Word of God, the original backstory had Misty pick up knowledge from books and having parents in the medical field. But Samantha thought Misty would have been more proactive about training herself.
  • Ella Purnell felt that Jackie would continue to keep wearing make-up and would be the last of the girls to keep doing so, up until she reads Shauna's diary.
  • Christina Ricci suggested that Misty would be drinking a chocolate martini instead of the Brandy Alexander she was down in the script to have.
• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Tawny Cypress and Christina Ricci are from New Jersey, like their characters. Christina even played on the girls' soccer team around the same time the past flashbacks take place.
  • Courtney Eaton, like Lottie, is mixed race with Caucasian and East Asian ancestry (although she's also part Māori, which Lottie's not been shown to be).
  • Natalie is a natural brunette who bleached her hair blonde as a teenager. Juliette Lewis indeed was blonde in her younger years too, and Natalie's teenage hair matches this look.
• The Cameo: John Cameron Mitchell appears as a singing, dancing, life-size version of Caligula in "Burial".
• Career Resurrection: Provided a big one for Melanie Lynskey, who had become a respected character actress thanks to Heavenly Creatures and acquired a notable bit of fame for Two and a Half Men. Growing dissatisfied with only being offered generic 'fat girl' parts, she turned to independent films for the 2010s. This brought her back to prominence, leading to a high profile role in The Last of Us (2023).
• Cast the Runner-Up: Sarah Desjardins auditioned for the teenage Shauna before getting cast as her daughter Callie.
• Dawson Casting:
  • The 1996 WHS Yellowjackets would have ranged in age from 14 to 18. Since Jackie and Shauna talk about their plans for college, they can be assumed to be 17 or 18. When production on the pilot episode began on November 2019, Ella Purnell (teenage Jackie) was 23, Samantha Hanratty (teenage Misty) was 24, and Jasmin Savoy Brown (teenage Taissa) was 25. According to a video interview, Kevin Alves (teen Travis) was around 28 or 29.
  • And in the present day, Sarah Desjardins was already in her mid-twenties playing Shauna's teenage daughter Callie.
• Deleted Role: There was a character named Cat Wheeler who had scenes scripted in the "Pilot" episode, with Amy Okuda even announced as having been cast in the role. However, none of these scenes nor the character herself appeared in the aired version. The "Pilot" was filmed well before the other episodes of the show and it is unclear at this time if Okuda ever actually filmed any scenes for the series.
• Dueling Works: With Prime Video's The Wilds, another show from the early 2020's revolving around a plane crash, and presented as a female-driven modern take on Lord of the Flies.
• Dyeing for Your Art: A necessity, given the Time-Shifted Actors. Tawny Cypress, who has green eyes, had to wear brown contacts to match Jasmin Savoy Brown. Same for blue-eyed Samantha Hanratty, who had to match eye color with brown-eyed Christina Ricci. Blonde Sophie Nélisse went brunette to match Melanie Lynskey.
• Early-Bird Release: The series premiered on Showtime on November 14, 2021, but they released the first episode free on YouTube on November 5. Additionally, for those who have the Showtime bundle with Hulu, or a cable/satellite login that allows them to login to the Showtime Anytime service, episodes are released to Hulu before they actually premiere the same day on Showtime, nearly a full day in advance. For the second season, this was exaggerated even further, with new episodes now releasing on Friday at midnight, nearly three whole days before the broadcast premiere.
• Fake American: The characters are high school students from a fictional town in New Jersey, USA. However, many are played by foreign actors: Canadian Sophie Nélisse as young Shauna (and likewise Sarah Desjardins as her daughter Callie); Australians Liv Hewson and Courtney Eaton (Van and Lottie); Englishwoman Ella Purnell as Jackie; New Zealanders Melanie Lynskey and Simone Kessell as older Shauna and Lottie respectively. The supporting characters Simone (Rukiya Bernard) and Jessica (Rekha Sharma) are also played by Canadians. Peter Gadiot (Adam) is also from England. Nuha Jes Izman (Crystal) is Malaysian and grew up in Kuala Lumpur.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: Christina Ricci was pregnant during filming the first season, and the jumpsuit Misty wears was her idea to help conceal it. As things were shot out of order, they had to constantly make sure she was wearing jackets or large sweaters to match continuity if they had to re-shoot anything.
• Inspiration for the Work: Creator Ashley Lyle was inspired to create the series when Warner Bros. Pictures announced an all-female film adaptation of Lord of the Flies (that seems to have since fallen into Development Hell) and noted the huge number of commenters who claimed it would never work since they believed teenage girls couldn't be as vicious as boys.
• No Stunt Double: Kevin Alves really did climb a forty foot tree in the second episode having only convinced the stunt coordinator the day of filming to let him do it.
• Orphaned Reference: There are several moments between Shauna and Javi in Season 1, such as her giving him pages from her journal to write on that were meant to be set-ups for when Adam was revealed as him in the original plans (see below).
• The Other Darrin:
  • Akilah was played by Keeyah King during season 1. Nia Sondaya was cast to play the character afterwards.
  • Jack DePew plays Jeff Sadecki as a teen in season 1. In season 2, for some reason Owen Gates plays him as a teen, but Jack DePew dubs the voice.
• The Other Marty: Callie was played by Ava Allan in the unaired pilot, and by Sarah Desjardins in the series proper.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Openly queer Jasmin Savoy Brown plays the teenage Taissa, who is later married to Simone.
  • Liv Hewson, who is gay and nonbinary, plays Van, a girl involved with Taissa when they're young.
  • Tawny Cypress, who played the adult Taissa, stated she's queer in Queer for Fear, a documentary that came out after the first season, saying that interestingly enough the film Heavenly Creatures (in which fellow cast member Melanie Lynskey had starred) made her realize this (she had fallen for her best friend at the time).
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle:
  • Adult Natalie's hair being in an unkempt bob was a result of Juliette Lewis cutting it that way for a previous role.
  • A flashback to Lottie's time in a Swiss mental hospital shows her hair being at shoulder-length, which is how Courtney Eaton actually had it at the time of filming, but of course had to wear a wig for continuity reasons in the scenes in the wilderness.
• Reality Subtext: Melanie Lynskey commented on the eerie timing of The Reveal that Shauna was pregnant in the woods, as she had suffered a miscarriage shortly before production began.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: The actors playing the younger and older versions of the characters really do strikingly resemble each other, though that is partly due to make up. Sophie Thatcher in particular absolutely nails Juliette Lewis's famous husky voice.
• Throw It In!: In the title sequence, the shot of Jackie threatening someone by miming slicing her throat before winking at the camera was taken from B-roll footage of Ella Purnell fooling around on set. When she saw it in the credits, she had no memory of filming it and had to ask the creators when it was from.
• Wag the Director:
  • For Shauna's first date with Adam, the script mentioned that she would go to her daughter's closet and take some of her underwear. Melanie Lynskey felt that wouldn't work due to Callie's smaller size, but also didn't want it to be a recurring theme after the pilot had shown Shauna masturbating in her daughter's room.
  • A sex scene was written for the adult Natalie, but Juliette Lewis felt that she "doesn't get off at all" at that point in her life and wouldn't have sex unless she was using it to get something.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Emily Hampshire of Schitt's Creek fame auditioned for the adult Misty before Christina Ricci was cast.
  • Laura Lee was originally going to die in the pilot episode and had only one or two lines. According to Melanie Lynskey (adult Shauna), this changed because Jane Widdop greatly impressed the show's writers at the table read.
  • In the original script, Coach Scott has a brief fling with Cat Wheeler, who was written as a female soccer coach that was going to come along on the flight, but was deleted from the final version of the series. This suggests that his character was not originally scripted to be gay.
  • Adam was going to be revealed to be an adult Javi but the writers went in a different direction.
  • Vanessa Palmer was supposed to die in the woods in the first season. The writers were so impressed with Liv Hewson's performance that not only does their character live, but was scripted to have survived into adulthood, with an adult version appearing in Season 2.
• Word of God: The program's showrunners confirmed in interviews that the references in Jackie's diary to movies released after the team's being stranded in the woods was intentional. They also confirmed that the heart found on the altar discovered by Simone with the dog Biscuit's head was that of Biscuit as well.

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