‘Yellowjackets’ Star Melanie Lynskey Confronts Bodyshaming: ‘She’s The Fat One’

For “Yellowjackets” star Melanie Lynskey, the drama didn’t end with the season finale!

The New Zealand actress, now 44, made several appearances in the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” which ran for twelve seasons from 2003 to 2015. From there, she has starred in plenty of flicks and series, from Hulu’s “Castle Rock” series to 2002’s “Sweet Home Alabama” with Reese Witherspoon, to Adam McKay’s 2021 climate change parody, “Don’t Look Up,” which recently became the second-most-watched film on Netflix!

The “Heavenly Creatures” star has quickly become a fan-favorite on Showtime’s “Yellowjackets” series, which has been described by fans as “a female ‘Lord of the Flies.’” The series tells the story of a girl's high-school soccer team that survives a plane crash in the Ontario wilderness and must do everything they can to survive.

In addition to Lynskey, the show features an all-star cast of Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Ella Purnell, Sophie Thatcher, Tawny Cypress, and Samantha Hanratty.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Melanie Lynskey revealed that “Yellowjacket” producers have criticized her appearance.

Although Lynskey didn’t name names, she admitted that someone on the “Yellowjackets” production team criticized how she looked.

“They were asking me, ‘What do you plan to do? I’m sure the producers will get you a trainer. They’d love to help you with this,’” she shared.

Although it was an embarrassing conversation for Lynskey, it helped that her “Yellowjackets” cast members – notably Ricci, Lewis, and Cypress – had her back. Lewis even went as far as to write a letter to the producers herself complaining about the poor way Lynskey was treated!

If that wasn’t enough, Lynskey also received criticism from fans who didn’t like how she was portrayed in a relationship with a younger man due to her age.

“I’m just like, ‘Wow, really? That’s where people’s heads are at, that the most important thing is being thin or wrong?’” she asked, adding that her character of Shauna is supposed to look like a “real woman” – not a thin, young model that is often portrayed in Hollywood stereotypes.

“It was really important to me for [Shauna] to not ever comment on my body, to not have me putting a dress on and being like, 'I wish I looked a bit better,'” she shared.

“I did find it important that this character is just comfortable and sexual and not thinking or talking about it because I want women to be able to watch it and be like, 'Wow, she looks like me and nobody's saying she's the fat one,’” she added. “That representation is important."

After the shocking season finale, series creators Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, and showrunner JonathanLisco sat down with Entertainment Weekly to talk about what fans can expect from the show’s second season.

In terms of timeline, the show definitely has plans to wind its way back to the opening scene.

Ashley Lyle explained that “we absolutely will get to that part of this story over the course of the series, I will say that.”

“That was always intended to be sort of the crux of their time out there and so the question that we wanted to pose was not so much what happens exactly — although the exact nature of what's happening there is ideally mysterious and poses some questions for the audience that we can eventually answer — but, it was always a question of how they got there,” she continued. “So we will ideally answer both: How they got there and what exactly it was we were seeing in that opening scene.”

Nickerson echoed her statements, saying, “We are definitely building back up to that. What we’re seeing will represent a bit of a climax of sorts but not the end. The plan is for the story to continue after that as well.”

As for the “Who Is Adam?” mystery, Nickerson explained that “‘who he was’ in terms of his unknown connection to one of the survivors has very much been answered. I think the question about what kind of impact he will have on the story moving forward is very much open.”

Season 1 of “Yellowjackets” is available to stream exclusively on Showtime.