Yellowjackets Stars Get Candid About the Pressures They Faced as Young Actors

Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey and Tawny Cypress may not be real-life plane crash survivors, but they've survived their rise in a cutthroat industry.

The actresses, who star in Showtime's hit series Yellowjackets, have been acting since they were teens and young adults. The four recently spoke of the immense pressure they faced in order to succeed in Hollywood. Specifically, the idea that if they wanted to be an award-winning star, they had to be skinny, sexy and give off the cool-girl vibe.

Christina recalled being labeled as "quirky," noting it was one of two categories actresses in the '90s tended to be sorted into. "If you weren't the leading-lady ingenue," she said in The Hollywood Reporter's cover story on the Yellowjackets stars, "then you were quirky and offbeat."

As the actresses explained, there's a fine balance between being the so-called "quirky" supporting character and the lead. And while the women weren't opposed to playing a supporting role, the people around them were always apprehensive, because, as Christina shared, "'Character actress' used to be something they used to describe an ugly woman."

Get All the Secrets Behind How Yellowjackets Assembled Its Stacked Cast

The Addams Family Values star continued, "They were so afraid of me not being a leading lady, of me not being sexually attractive to people. It was really the last thing I ever wanted, was for anyone to be attracted to me."

Juliette noted that she felt this pressure too, but it made her rebel and do the opposite of whatever she was told. She remembered crying in the bathroom during photoshoots because she didn't want to do what people expected of her. "They want these doe-eyed looks," she shared. "That's for sure what I didn't do in pictures, so I always looked slightly insane, which I prefer over, like, 'Do you want to f--k me?'"

Melanie, meanwhile, found comfort in being relegated to smaller roles because it meant that she faced less criticism than her co-stars. She looked back on playing Piper Perabo's friend in Coyote Ugly, saying, "The scrutiny that was on Piper, who's one of the coolest, smartest women, just the way people were talking about her body, talking about her appearance, focusing on what she was eating. All the girls had this regimen they had to go on. It was ridiculous."

That's not to say that Melanie wasn't made to feel bad about her appearances. The Candy star said that despite being a size four, she was told that she needed to wear Spanx and contour her face to make her look thinner. "Just the feedback was constantly like, 'You're not beautiful,'" Melanie said. "In your early 20s, so much of it is about beauty, and how people respond to you, and do people want to f--k you?"

As an up-and-coming Black actress during the early aughts, Tawny faced an entirely different set of struggles than her Yellowjackets co-stars because she didn't really have a choice when it came to the roles she was offered. "I've spent my whole career doing s--tty roles of the sassy one on the side," she shared. "Honestly, growing up as an actor, I wanted to be an ingenue."

The actresses' experiences have made them protective of their other co-stars, who play the '90s versions of their characters in Yellowjackets. Juliette said, "There is a thing I always want to say to young people: Cultivate other interests deeply so that you're not getting all your life's blood from this industry, or your self-worth."

Yellowjackets season one is streaming now on Showtime.

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