Juliette Lewis Doesn’t Rule Out a ‘Yellowjackets’ Return
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As Yellowjackets season two viewers now know, Juliette Lewis’ character met a tragic ending.
In the shocking May 2023 finale of the hit Showtime series, adult Natalie (Lewis) was — spoiler alert! — accidentally killed by Misty (Christina Ricci) during a wilderness reunion gone wrong between the adult survivors of the soccer team’s 1996 plane crash.
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Lewis, who has remained relatively quiet about her arc since the finale released, reflected on exiting the series at the 2023 Emmys — though she left the door slightly ajar to return for season three.
“I thought they wrapped up the characters really beautifully, and I just love good writing, so I was happy to be a part of it,” she told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet. “And I’ll miss my cast. Such a good group of girls, I love them so much. They’re going to do amazing.”
In the 1996 timeline, the Yellowjackets soccer team was stranded for 19 months as teenagers, pushing them to cannibalism and other violence in order to survive. The second season ended with the young team still stranded, while the adults suffered the death of one of their own with Natalie. The character is played by Sophie Thatcher in the younger timeline.
Yellowjackets, which flips back and forth from 1996 to present day (and briefly introduced a third timeline of when the team is rescued), has featured Lewis as a series regular from the start. She makes up the core foursome along with Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Taissa (Tawney Cypress) and Misty, with Lottie (Simone Kessell) and Van (Lauren Ambrose) expanding the adult survivors in season two.
When speaking to THR about handing Lewis this fate so early in the show’s run (the co-creators have a five-season plan), director and EP Karyn Kusama said that, while the decision was hard and emotional, Natalie’s arc had been teed up in the pilot.
“Something I know the showrunners had always thought about, and that [co-creators] Ashley [Lyle] and Bart [Nickerson] had always thought about from the pilot, was that mysterious moment when Natalie hallucinates Misty at the kegger in the woods,” shared Kusama, who directed both the pilot and season two finale. “That was always this time-defying flash-forward to the notion that Misty was always going to be kind of an angel of death for Natalie.”
At the time, Kusama hadn’t ruled out that Lewis could return in some form down the line (“What I’ve learned about Ashley and Bart and Jonathan [Lisco] is that they are kind of a never-say-never group. I find they’re always super open to imagining things if it drives the story into an interesting place,” she said.)
When speaking to THR at the Emmys, Lewis seemed open to the idea of her character returning in a flashback or some other way.
“I don’t know anything,” she said, “but I think that’s a good idea. We’ll see what happens.”
Going into the Emmys, Yellowjackets was nominated for best drama series, and Lewis was nominated for best supporting actress in a TV limited or anthology series for her role as costume designer Denise Coughlan in Welcome to Chippendales.
When taking in the talent in the room, she named White Lotus boss Mike White as her next dream collaborator: “He already cast [season three of] White Lotus. Anything he does, I would want to be a part of.”
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