Spoilers ahead for Yellowjackets season 3.
Yellowjackets season 3 has been nothing if not divisive, with multiple members of the adult timeline cast being killed off — and an especially shocking death for Van Palmer, played by Lauren Ambrose, who is guided to the afterlife by her younger counterpart, played by Liv Hewson. With this in mind, Hewson has been very curious to see how the fandom will react.
The day episode 9 of the third season was released, fans were threatening to stop watching the show entirely, gutted to have seen one of their faves die in a brutal moment that was set to Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film)” — an apropos backing track for cinephile Van. Hewson, 29, is just as gutted that Ambrose’s time on the show seems to be at an end for now — you really never know with Yellowjackets — but they hope viewers won’t give up just yet.
“I would hope that people keep watching the show, because it's not done — if and when we're lucky enough to make more of it. It's not done, and I'm not done, which means Van isn't done either, because I'm Van too,” Hewson tells Teen Vogue. “I plan to keep performing her the same way I always have, because I care about it and I love it. I can tell that the audience does, too, because otherwise it wouldn't matter."
Hewson continues, "That's what makes it upsetting — because you care about it and you love it. So, in some ways, I take it as a compliment. But I would encourage people to stick around, because there's more, and it would be nice if people saw it.”
The outraged reaction from fans was a week before the finale aired, which was chock-full of long-awaited answers: We know who Pit Girl is now, and that Van was the Yellowjacket standing over the pit in the first episode; but we also know that Van pulls off her mask and starts sobbing, which we didn’t see in the original depiction.
“This is the thing that everybody's been waiting to see, and this is the most f*cked up and aggressive people are expecting us to get,” says Hewson. “However, we are playing a bunch of devastated teenagers. This is as much an arrival of a place the audience was excited to get to as a reveal of how complex and sad it is to have been here the whole time.”
Read on for Teen Vogue's conversation with Hewson about working with Ambrose to close a chapter of Van Palmer’s story, and with the showrunners to avoid a “bury your gays” plot, whether we’ll see more of post-Wilderness Van in season 4, and the gay and gore of Yellowjackets season 3.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Liv Hewson: I was very grown up and professional about it, then went home and cried and had my own little pocket of sadness about it. And then I went back to work.
Over the course of the season, something that I'm really grateful for — because they didn't have to do it — [was that] the showrunners were very generous with me in fielding some questions I had about what they were planning, letting me say my piece about some themes that were important to me, or some things that I wanted to avoid. The story breakdown of how it happened was completely in their hands, but I was really gratified to be able to [weigh in].
Lauren and I talked a lot over the course of this season about Van, about how we were both feeling and what we were thinking, and what we both wanted to get done in the time we had left together working on this character.
The notion that the two of us would have scenes together actually came out of a desire the two of us had to work together. That was Lauren's idea. Part of it was thematic and part of it was selfish. There is this established narrative device in which these two timelines can interact in dreams or sort of liminal space-fantasy sequences, so there's precedent.
Lauren and I wanted to work together, so that was something that the two of us had talked about. And she was like, “Well, it'd be nice before I go, if we could.” Then I asked if that was something that was of interest to the showrunners and the writers as they were planning this episode, and thankfully, they were like, “Oh my God, absolutely, not a problem!”
So it's meaningful to both of us that that ends up being a pretty significant piece of the closing of Van’s story in the present. Being able to do those things with Lauren, and to have Van Palmer sit with herself, was really special to me.
LH: Through a meta-accident in the decision to keep me around, and in what's happened in the story since then, there's been this theme established with Van that she is un-killable, or has escaped death over and over again. Which wasn't necessarily their intention from the get go, because Van wasn't going to be around initially. So, in deciding to keep me and in what's happened since then, Van Palmer has a distinct and unique relationship with death. Her relationship with death is a core thematic pillar, in my mind, of how her character operates within the story.
In making the decision to have her die in the story in the present, what does that mean about Van's relationship to death? What are we saying about Van's relationship to death? Whatever happened to her, it was important that it not be something that could have happened to anybody, because Van's relationship to death is specific, so her death also needed to be specific, in my opinion. The showrunners were like, “Of course, that's important to us as well.”
Then I was thinking about things like fire and abandonment and shame, and the fact that Van's sense of herself is so drastically different as we meet her when Lauren plays her versus as it is when it's my half.
I think it was [co-creator and showrunner] Ashley [Lyle] who said to me, “Obviously, we're very aware of ‘bury your gays’ stuff, and we're not interested in doing any of that.” And I was like, “Amazing, of course not.” It was just, like, I don't want it to be an accident; I don't want it to be interchangeable. And they were really on that same page, too, that this ought to be about Van and it ought to be specific to her.
LH: I always knew that the difference between my Van's belief in the Wilderness and Lauren's Van's lack of it would be narratively coming down the pike at some point. At some stage, there's going to be a shift in Van’s belief system or in Van’s willingness to participate in a lot of this stuff. What I wasn't expecting was for it to happen this soon, and this distinctly. That was really cool to get to do.
It so clearly hinged on the arrival of the scientists [in episode 7]. Everything completely turns on its head for Van once those people stumble into camp, because it's an introduction of an outside view. Van is so about narrativizing what's happened to them, and framing things a certain way in order to make them survivable or doable. The introduction of a fresh audience completely shatters her ability to maintain the internal narrative she's had for herself up until this point. It's like, “Oh no, from an outside perspective, this looks like we're eating our soccer coach and everything's falling apart!” And that's because that is what's happening! She can't make it doable for herself anymore.
Suddenly, Van becomes an 18-year-old again, who is struck by the shamefulness and the guilt of what they're doing and what they've done up until this point. Suddenly, home is real again, in a way that it wasn't when there was no one around to remind her that it was real.
Then in the meeting of the Vans in 7, and again in 9, it was just really clear to Lauren and I that adult Van carries so much shame about that time and, to a certain degree, some resentment for that part of herself. There's a cringe away from herself as a teenager, like, “Oh my God, you don't know anything, you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what it's going to be like to have to live with this.” So there was this dynamic between the two of us that I thought was really beautiful: Her as an adult, struggling to live with who she was as a teenager; and then me playing that character as a teenager, so in love with this person she's become, so proud of her.
LH: There's this dynamic that I love, that I think is very true to life, that if you were able to talk to yourself when you were younger, that person probably thinks you're incredibly cool and brave and interesting, and they're probably really proud of you. But when you think about yourself as an adolescent, it's like, Oh, God, Jesus Christ, it's horrible. Get away from me!
LH: And that’s without the eating people. Eating people charges it with extra pain. There was something really gorgeous about that to me, to get to play this sort of inner-child integration for Van.
LH: Jenna Burgess — who I love, who plays Melissa in the '90s – and I talked about that a lot. Even pre-this, Jenna and I have had this running joke that Melissa's a grade younger, and between Van and Melissa in the Wilderness, there's probably a bit of a baby butch identification, like, “Hey, what's up?” “Nothing, what's up with you?” A sweet adolescent baby gay-sibling identification vibe. It's fascinating to the two of us, as well, that that is where it ends up, because that is a significant shift in the dynamic between these two characters that we as an audience have not spent a lot of time with.
The stuff between Jenna and I in episode 9, some of that was us [improvising]. Van going over to Melissa after she's pissed her pants with the shotgun, Jenna and I decided to do that. A big part of the reason was, one, because it made sense to the two of us, and also, it does layer what happens between those two characters later. Maybe it was a bit evil of us.
LH: That relationship is interesting to the two of us in our bit and in the future. When Hilary [Swank] and Lauren were working together, Jenna and I went. We were there talking to the two of them and watching them do it, which was wild, because those two are just such incredible actors, and it was amazing to watch.
It was a sort of trippy Yellowjackets time travel moment, as well, to be sitting behind the monitors. At one point, Lauren pulled me into the kitchen in the house… So Hilary and Lauren are playing out Melissa murdering Van, and then I'm literally off camera around the corner behind the kitchen island. Then later in the story, as teen Van, I'm watching in the plane, and she's watching with me. It was just these circles stacked on top of each other.
The potential of the Melissa-Van dynamic going forward, knowing that that is where it ends up, but not quite knowing what the turn for Melissa's character is between then and now, and what has happened between those two people between then and now — I think that is a site of some interesting material, potentially. Jenna and I have definitely thought about that.
LH: It's been awesome. I mean, that's the dream for me. From day one, when I first read the pilot — a million years ago now — I had always thought, I'm either gonna watch this or I'm gonna be in it, one of those two things is happening.
I have always felt that I would be a fan of this show even if I wasn't in it. So when things unfold in the show, I react to them in two ways: as someone whose job it is to work on the thing and then as an audience member. Because, in so many ways, that is how I think about myself. This season has been really fun in that regard.
Personally, I do want the things that I'm in to be as gay as humanly possible. Because why not? That ought to be allowed. As an audience member, oh my god, this would have blown my mind. This would have made me so happy. That's cool to be part of something that I know would have been significant for me even as someone uninvolved.
LH: It's definitely not lost on me, and never has been, but especially isn't lost on me right now.
It's a position that I'm really grateful to be in, that we're all really grateful to be in. And yeah, sometimes it feels like we're just off in the corner doing our thing, looking over our shoulder like, “Is this still fine? Okay, sure.”
I'm not going anywhere, I'm not gonna stop. So here's our gay show stacked with interesting and f*cked-up women. Enjoy.
LH: For Van there has been this epiphany that none of this is real at all, and that's so distressing and so tragic and sort of unlivable for her. But that's what enables her to make the decision to sneak off and try and fix the SAT phone, and that's what makes her so upset by the time we're hunting Mari.
It's not only that she's upset that Mari is dead, that they're hunting everybody, and that this is where they are — there's a devastation that this is the place we're in now that Van can see that they don't have to be there.
She's also upset about everything that's happened up until this point. It's not just about Mari; it's about Javi. It's about what she's done, what she's enabled other people to do.
There's this line in episode 10 between Van and Taissa, where Van says, “I thought that was the point, the Wilderness decides.” There was something so tragic about that line to me. I remember getting ready to say it, holding the queen card in my hand and thinking, Yeah, I thought that was the point. What was the point of this? What are we doing? I thought there was a point. And in 10, for Van, there just isn't. That's the tragedy for her, and that's what she's carrying around in the present: I was so wrong about all of this, and now I'm trapped. I can't do anything about it.
LH: The person over the pit with the mohawk and soccer shirt — I've always known that's me. It's funny, it's not that anyone ever told me that was me, but there was something about the shirt. I remember at the season 1 premiere texting everybody like, “Guys, I think that's me.”
Then this season, Marie, the costume designer, she made sure to put me in the sweater that the mask becomes, because she said, “We just need to see you in it once.” There's been a whole tracking process — who was wearing the pink Converse when? But I was like, “That's me. I'm getting them.” I just knew it.
My partner has a picture on their phone of me getting ready to film 10 in our living room, standing in front of the television, trying to match the posture standing over the pit, being like, “Okay, and then I breathe in, and then I look over which shoulder? And then I step with this?” Trying to match what was happening. That was an interesting exercise, to weave in the physical performance of the stunt person who did that work in the pilot, knowing that I'm stitching it together with a version of Van who was devastated by what's happening.
That was so much of the work everybody did in filming 10, matching enough to stitch everything together, while also revealing to the audience that what they saw in the pilot is not a complete representation of what's actually been going on for these people. Obviously that says a bunch of interesting stuff about the incompleteness of memory, and the retelling of an event that doesn't quite capture what was so devastating about it or so powerful about it.
And there's this juxtaposition between where everybody has always expected these people to end up versus how young and damaged they are. I think there's so many beautiful reminders this season of how young everybody is. All of those things were on my mind as we were filming 10.
LH: I am really fascinated to see what the response to 10 is, because you're absolutely right: We're so conscious that this is something that the audience has been kind of chomping at the bit for, for ages. So it's like, how is this gonna land? What are people gonna take away from it? I'm not sure, but I'm looking forward to it.
LH: I am interested in the same things I've always been interested in, which is the insinuation that the Yellowjackets became tabloid fodder when they got back. The psychological impact of returning to society, except it's the late '90s in New Jersey and you're a homosexual.
Then the difference between Van and Tai's willingness to be out, and what it would mean for the two of them to have a bunch of public scrutiny on them — Van as a young, butch lesbian who has scars on her face, and Taissa as a young lesbian who's a Black woman. What is gonna happen to you two? Knowing that Van at some point goes off on her own, there is a disintegration; and at some point she gets sick.
There’s a lot there, to say nothing of how they each interact with the rest of the team once they get back. Everybody ends up at Shauna’s wedding at some point.
At the end of episode 9 there was a lot of discussion as to what I would be wearing on the plane. What I really wanted, and what Marie the costume designer really wanted — we worked [it] out together — was the outfit that you see me in. That is not something we've seen me wear before. There's the option for me to appear in that sequence as I did pre-crash, but I didn't want to do that because, on a superficial level, I look completely different, and I didn't know that it would sell. [Adult] Van seeing her [younger] self with the scars really mattered to me.
I kind of like the gentle insinuation that maybe that's Van after they got back; maybe that's Van at 20; maybe that's Van after a little bit of time has passed. When you think about how does Van see herself, I think she sees herself impacted by everything that they went through. Who these characters are [while] impacted by everything that they went through is something that we’re still approaching, and I'm excited by that.
