Christina Ricci Reveals a Specific Change for Her Character in ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2

Jackie Strause
·3 min read
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Christina Ricci is aware of the fandom around Yellowjackets.

During a visit to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Ricci admitted that she and her co-stars on the hit Showtime series felt the pressure when filming season two, which premieres March 24.

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“Everybody was terrified,” she told host Stephen Colbert of the cast, which also includes Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis and Tawny Cypress, returning to set following the Emmy-nominated and well-received first season (which currently has a 100 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes). “There’s been a lot of hype and build-up about how good everything is. It’s so wonderful to be so well-received and the accolades and everything, but then you have to go back and do it again.”

And when it came to her character, the dark yet quirky Yellowjackets survivor Misty, Ricci said there is one change viewers will notice in season two.

“For me, she’s so specific, this character I play. And people picked out little things, like the way I walked as Misty,” she said, agreeing with Colbert that her walk had a waddle to it. “But, I was pregnant at the time. So my walk was because I had a baby inside of me. (Laughs.) So when I went back to do season two I was like, ‘Why can’t I do the walk?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, damnit, I’m not pregnant anymore!’ So there were little things like that and yes, it’s intimidating.”

Ricci, also a mom to 8-year-old son Freddie, welcomed her second child, daughter Cleopatra, in December 2021. The first season of Yellowjackets began airing the month prior.

Also during her visit to Colbert, the veteran actress spoke about relating to her passive-aggressive characters on both Yellowjackets and on Netflix’s Wednesday reboot, and teased Elijah Wood as being a love interest on Yellowjackets season two. Wood joins the series in a season-long guest role as Walter, a citizen detective who links up with Misty. (Simone Kessell and Lauren Ambrose are also new series regulars.)

“Most of the season, for me, was spent with Elijah in two-man scenes,” she said of reuniting with her Ice Storm co-star, the 1997 Ang Lee movie they filmed together when they were both 15. “I remember everything and he remembers nothing — just like every man I’ve ever known,” she quipped.

When speaking recently to The Hollywood Reporter at SXSW, several other Yellowjackets castmembers echoed Ricci’s sentiment about the buzz around season two. Cypress, Samantha Hanratty, Sophie Nélisse, Kevin Alves and Steven Krueger collectively agreed they were “terrified” about returning, but that after reading the second episode of the new season, they knew it would live up to the hype. “The second episode I was like, ‘Wow,'” said Hanratty, who plays the younger version of Ricci’s character.

In its first season, Yellowjackets followed two timelines: the past, when a plane crash left the high school soccer team, called the Yellowjackets, stranded in the wilderness for 19 months in 1996; and the present, to show how the survivors are handling their trauma 25 years later. The season two trailer answered some finale cliffhangers and raised new questions for when the show picks up where it left off.

The logline for the second season of Yellowjackets, which comes from married creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, reads: “Two months have passed since Shauna gave Jackie the cold shoulder— to disastrous results. In the face of their deepening hunger and fear, the tension among our Yellowjackets has only grown worse. The harsh conditions of winter are intensifying by the day, and the psyches of our survivors are deteriorating just as fast. Threatened by the darkness of the wilderness — and the haunting memories of it in the present — our former state champs will be forced to make impossible decisions. As they confront the horrible truth of what survival entails, the real nightmare for each of them will be to figure out who they are — and what they are willing to sacrifice in order to stay alive.”

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