Yellowjackets' Melanie Lynskey on Shauna's "dark" relationship with Callie
"Oh, God. It's so horrible."
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Yellowjackets season 2.
The relationship between present day Shauna and her teenage daughter Callie has been a core focus of Yellowjackets, with season 2 delving further into their complicated dynamic.
Not only does Callie know that her mum had an affair with Adam Martin, she has since discovered that Shauna was the one who murdered him after suspecting her lover of blackmail. It later emerged that her husband Jeff was responsible.
Reflecting on how Shauna feels about saddling Callie with that knowledge, Melanie Lynskey told RadioTimes.com: "I think that she feels terrible. She feels really bad about it.
"On the one hand, she's grateful because there are a couple of times where Callie steps in and saves her in a way. But I think it's difficult to see parts of yourself that you're not necessarily proud of be reflected in your child."
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She went on to say that despite the fraught nature of their relationship, Callie "does want her mother to feel proud of her".
We see that in episode 5 when Callie informs her mum that she told the police detective Shauna was cheating on Jeff with his best friend Randy in order to muddy the investigation into Adam's death. "It's actually not a terrible idea," remarks Shauna.
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"So, I did fix it?" responds Callie. When she gets the nod of approval, her face lights up and she skips out of the room. "Oh, God," laughed Lynskey. "It's so horrible. So dark."
Lynskey went on to talk about her next project, an adaptation of best-selling novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which also stars Jonah Hauer-King (The Little Mermaid), Anna Próchniak (Baptiste) and Jonas Nay (Deutschland 83, 86, 89).
The Sky/Peacock six-part series recounts the true story of Lale Sokolov, a Jewish prisoner who was given the job of tattooing identification numbers on his fellow prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the First World War.
"If I read something and it moves me and I think it's really good, I'd feel silly to say no," the actor said when asked if she's drawn to unsettling subject matter off the back of Yellowjackets and The Last of Us.
"There was a part of me that was hoping for a comedy. This is not that. It's really not. But maybe the next one."
Yellowjackets streams on Paramount Plus in the UK – get Paramount Plus for no extra cost on Sky, or get a seven-day free trial of Paramount Plus on Amazon Prime Video.
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