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.
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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
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