Yellowjackets star Jasmin Savoy Brown is banking on queer joy and resistance to get through the Trump administration.
Part of that includes the new podcast Today In Gay, which launched at the end of 2024 (Brown is one of six producers and the creator of the show) and was described by Them as a “queer and trans version of The Daily.” Another part of that is, as she’s expressed before, through her acting work, including on the currently airing Yellowjackets season 3.
Then again, there’s no shortage of darkness on Yellowjackets, between all the cannibalism and cults and murder. In the show’s teen timeline in 1997, Brown’s character Taissa is a year into being stranded in the wilderness with her high school soccer team, who crash-landed there. While her adult counterpart, played by Tawny Cypress, is seemingly growing ever more unhinged, young Tai has stepped into the structure the girls have created in the absence of adults.
In a recent episode – spoilers – Taissa was the prosecutor in a darkly funny jury trying Coach Ben (played by Steven Kreuger) for, allegedly, burning down their cabin at the end of season 2. Tai is calm and composed, with her girlfriend (Liv Hewson’s Van) serving as bailiff — or something? The judicial details seem only sort of relevant.
But in the most recent episode, Tai risks disrupting that stability by trying to tap into her shadow self, one of the more obvious doppelgänger subplots in a show obsessed with mirror images and doubles. Without giving away too much, when asked if she saw young Tai’s vibe as more stable, Brown replied, “Until a certain point, that's all I'll say.”
Teen Vogue talks to Brown about Today in Gay, her media mogul plans, and Yellowjackets season three.
Jasmin Savoy Brown: It's scary. It's definitely really scary times, and I have had panic attacks and breakdowns about it, like all of us. But then – and this is just me being honest, I'm not even like plugging the podcast – it's truly giving me so much hope to log in every day, and I get the pleasure of recording this with them and helping create the show every day. There is really good, beautiful stuff happening for our community — in politics, Chase Strangio; and the amount of queer people that were elected to the legislature and all over in politics this year.
But also, just on a personal basis, people are still falling in love, people are still getting married and building communes and hosting drag shows and fighting back. And it just makes me, personally, so happy to have a space to learn that every day, because we need that right now more than anything. Oh, my God. We need hope so bad.
JSB: In my producer era, for sure. I have so much more respect and appreciation for all the producers, because, holy shi*t, producing is a lot. Because [Today in Gay is] a daily show, we were like, oh, we've already recorded 35 episodes or something, which on a normal one show a week podcast, we’d be in like September by now! Like, God, we're moving and learning at hyper speed.
We are a big team, we have six producers now – myself, Nay Bever, Lauren Klein, Jax Ko, Linh Nguyen, and Maritza Navarro. As a team, oh, my God, we need that many people. We need six producers to make a daily show run, and everyone has a different perspective and a different approach.
And thank God for all types of queers, all across the birth chart spectrum. We've got a lot of Capricorn energy, a lot of Cancer energy, and a good amount of Scorpio. That’s what we need to [read] these headlines.
JSB: When I’m by myself, it's scary, but as soon as we're all together on the computer recording the episode, the fear goes away, because I'm like, oh, right — community, that's the point. They want us – they being, you know who I'm talking about – they want us to feel isolated, so that we do feel scared and overwhelmed and powerless, but as soon as we're in community, which the gays are really good at, we're smarter, we're stronger, things get lighter. It's not as hard or scary. And that's the point of the podcast, is to have this community to turn to and tune into every day, so that it's not as scary.
Everything is easier in community. It's easier to march, it's easier to push for change. It's even easier to have a good day when there's other people around. So yes and no.
JSB: Okay, you must have had some weird ass dreams.
JSB: It makes it feel like, whatever choice I make as younger Tai, it's fine, because Tawny as Tai is gonna have a lot more to deal with. Nothing I do will seem that crazy.
JSB: You've seen more than me. They love us to be in the dark throughout the season as we're filming. It's not like the shows where they give you all ten episodes, or they tell you what's coming in the next one: We know nothing about what happens, and then as the rollout happens per season, we're always the last to see the episodes. I don't know why. There must be a method to the madness. Or there's just not a single gay person on staff, because a gay person would know that we want to see the episodes.
JSB: It's a bit odd, because when I shot this pilot, I was 25; this was pre-pandemic. I was in a different relationship and living in a different place with different people — lived a completely different life. And the difference between 25 and not 25 is drastic. I've gone through a lot of changes as a person.
Meanwhile, Tai has only lived eight or 12 months or something, so it's definitely an exercise as an actor to keep going back there, being like, whoa. I'm completely different. How can I access that state just as truthfully and it be the same, but different? It's a really good exercise. It's really difficult, but it's made easier by the actors that I get to work with.
God, everyone is at the top of their game. Everyone is fantastic; amazing writing; excellent directors this season; two of our showrunners and one of the show creators each directed an episode, and that was just so much fun. The show really levels up this season.
JSB: [What’s next is] very gay, it's very Black, and I'm very excited. I mean, no one's gonna believe me, it's been years, but I do have an EP. Five songs, I've shot four music videos. I’m just waiting because I want to shoot the fifth one. We're going Beyonce on this shit. We're doing visuals for everything. So four done, one left. I'm very excited. They're all so different.
I have a couple other podcasts and development scripts going on. There's a lot going on. You just gotta watch this space, as the kids say.
JSB: I think creating and producing feels like the right next step for me. I've waited until now because I wanted to make sure that I had enough experience and also the financial ability to do exactly what I want. I'm really fortunate for Yellowjackets to have gotten another season, and I'm fortunate to be in the financial position to now actually fund my own projects, which means that no one can change my voice or my intent. That's really important as a queer Black woman, that my POV remains mine. When money gets involved with other people, or you're beholden to someone else's budget, someone else's whatever, when it comes to music or the podcast or anything, then you have to do what they want, have the guests that they want, hire who they want to direct, etcera, etcera, etcera, and it's not yours anymore.
I think especially now, while media is under attack, it's important that marginalized folks get to share their POV. So I'm not signed to a music label, I'm not signed to a podcast production company, and I think that's why this moment is really important for me. I hope that the right people who I would feel safe collaborating with see what I'm doing and want to give me their money. I don't have that much, I have enough to get it off the ground, but I'm hoping the right people will see what I’m doing. Call me please.
JSB: I just want to encourage people to listen to the podcast. Subscribe to our Substack. We're about to start dropping bi-weekly, sometimes weekly, interviews that'll be exclusive to Substack with super super cool folks that you won’t want to miss. And, yeah, keep being queer, keep being trans, keep being Black, keep being you. We need you, we need you. We need you so much.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
