Yellowjackets star Sophie Nélisse reveals what the ear was made out of
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Warning: This post contains spoilers from the season 2 premiere of Yellowjackets.
Losing a best friend is hard in any circumstance. Said best friend finding out you're pregnant with her boyfriend's baby while stranded post-plane crash and then freezing to death? Yeah, it's fair to say that Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is going to be unpacking that for a while.
When Shauna lost Jackie (Ella Purnell) in the Yellowjackets season 1 finale, fans weren't sure how the pregnant teen was going to cope. Now that the season 2 premiere has dropped, we know she's coping by... not really coping. Shauna spends much of the first episode talking to Jackie's corpse as if she's still alive.
"Because of the circumstances, she's not really coping the way you would normally cope," Nélisse tells EW. "Her coping mechanisms are just so thrown off, and what I find really interesting is there's some guilt but also a lot of weird freedom at the same time. This weight is lifted off her shoulders so that she can finally find her voice. I think she feels so conflicted in all of her emotions."
Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME Sophie Nélisse on 'Yellowjackets'
Shauna's conflicted emotions get all the more complicated when she knocks Jackie's body over, causing Jackie's frozen ear to fall off. Traumatized, Shauna then pockets the ear, spending the rest of the episode glancing at it whenever she gets a chance. And in the episode's final moments, she... takes a bite out of it. (They are running low on meat rations and they're all very hungry.)
"It was just, like, silicone," Nélisse says of the fake ear. "It was super squishy, kind of like a gummy almost." And if that ending is any indication of what's to come, Nélisse adds, "It's going to be a ride of a season."
As for where the ear lives now, co-showrunner Ashley Lyle says, "We wrapped [the season] and props asked, 'What do you want to take home as a souvenir?' So I got an ear and I think I'm going to frame it in a little shadowbox."
Jackie's ear might be gone, but it won't soon be forgotten.
New episodes of Yellowjackets drop Fridays on streaming and on-demand.
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