This article contains spoilers for episodes one and two of season two of Yellowjackets.
“I woke up like 20 minutes ago,” says Sophie Thatcher, laughing. It’s noon in LA where the 22-year-old Yellowjackets star is currently catching up on sleep after six months shooting season two of the hit Showtime series in Vancouver. The platinum blonde hair she sports in the show as teenage burnout Nat has made way for her usual jet black look.
Born in Illinois before moving to New York, Sophie has been singing and acting since she joined a performing arts school at the age of four. “When I was younger I always had the intent of doing theatre. You know when you put what you want to be when you’re older in your yearbook? I wrote ‘A famous Broadway star’ and then, with an asterisk, ‘A very famous Broadway star’,” she says sheepishly. The raspy vocal fry she uses to emulate 90s Hollywood star Juliette Lewis, who plays the older version of Nat on the show, has made the ability to do musical theatre again difficult. “When I sing now I can’t hit the same notes,” she says. “But I would go back to theatre in a second,” she adds.
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Sophie landed her first major role at the age of 15 in the 2016 TV series adaptation of The Exorcist, playing the young, soon-to-be-possessed Reagan, and, two years later, in the sci-fi indie Prospect (2018) with Pedro Pascal. If fame was something her younger self craved, Yellowjackets brought it to her. In early 2022, she won a part in the grisly series about a high school girls soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness in the mid-90s, forcing them to fend for themselves. In a parallel timeline, we follow the surviving members of the group in the present day, as they try to reckon with the disturbing actions they took in order to survive. The show’s first season was a hit, fast becoming the second most streamed series in Showtime’s history and receiving seven nominations at the Emmys; when it won none of them, it caused online outrage. In March, the show returned for season two and has since been renewed for a third.
Sophie’s Natalie Scatorccio is an outsider at school and ostracised by her soccer teammates due to her dark energy and struggles with alcohol and drugs. After the plane crash, however, Nat quickly proves the most useful of the group, becoming one of only two that can use a gun and hunt for food. She soon forms a romantic bond with the sole male survivor, Travis.
At the start of season two, several months have passed and winter has set in. “Nobody’s in a good place,” Sophie says of where we find them. “Everyone is losing their sense of selves and getting further away from who they used to be. Nat is deeper in isolation. Being the huntress is the only thing that’s keeping her going.” Nat was the most grounded character in the first season, Sophie thinks. While the others are lost in delusions, reckless hopes and petty qualms, Nat’s past trauma keeps her rational. She acts as a sounding board for other characters’ troubles. “That’s why people watching resonated with her; she has this heart. But of course we’re gonna lose some of that.” Not only do the arctic temperatures bring new hardships, there are also mysterious malevolent forces in the woods that threaten to tear the survivors apart.
Sophie’s character evolves, over the course of this season, to be more like Juliette Lewis’ older version of Nat. “Juliette and I text each other after each script is released like, ‘Yo, thoughts?’,” she says. “We’re always on the same page. Juliette’s Nat is very complex; she’s a harder version of Nat to play. But I’m getting there, which is fun. Of all the characters, there’s a finer distinction between 1990s and present day Nat. They both share the same vulnerability but there’s still some lightness and humour in younger Nat that remains and this season that gets slowly chipped away.”
“We kind of normalise cannibalism on the show. It’s fucking defeating and terrible but it doesn’t feel evil.”
Filming season one in Canada’s forests during the pandemic offered the cast a real insight into the isolation and fears of the unknown their characters were facing. “It was just us,” Sophie says. “Being out there in the wilderness was an immersive experience. It was almost like a parallel world.” While a few early days of production on season two were also spent in the forests of Alberta — where The Revenant was filmed, coincidentally — much of the second season was instead shot in a studio in Vancouver. “Alberta was absolutely freezing but it was beautiful and scenic and vast and so cinematic,” she says. “I was worried that with the stage we’d lose that feeling but it looks incredible.”
Sophie had a different traumatic experience to draw on for season two. “The day I was supposed to leave for Vancouver, I got into this really bad scooter accident,” she says, a little hesitant at first. “Like, my face was kind of fucked up and I had to get new teeth. It was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me in my life.” She channelled that into understanding Nat’s own struggles and hardships. “I came into this experience with something really traumatic but it pushed me forward and gave me a different outlook and survivor mentality. Nat has had a survivor mentality her entire life.”
“I feel like I’ve been through a lot in my life and I’ll keep going no matter what,” she adds. “I’m not Natalie, I wouldn’t be as skilled or as smart as her but I have the same resilience. I’ve been having so many dreams about the end of the world and post-apocalyptic situations and in all my dreams I never give up.”
As the script got darker towards the end of filming season two, both Sophie and the rest of the cast began having intense nightmares. Fans will have already seen how the show gets deeper into the fleshy realm of cannibalism teased last season. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding psycho but, on the show, we kind of normalise it. We go into those scenes thinking about our character’s mentality and it’s fucking defeating and terrible but it doesn’t feel evil.” Sophie has her own theories as to why cannibal tales, like Yellowjackets and Bones & All, might be resonating with people right now. “Everyone is striving for something as dark as possible as if our world isn’t already dark,” she says. “As an actor, I just want something I’ll never experience, something really far out. I grew up with horror and was obsessed with zombies. I made 10 zombie movies with my twin and my friends growing up. I think that’s why I keep getting cast in stuff like this.”
“When I first saw my movie Prospect in theatres I thought my career was over.”
Sophie’s next project is, aptly, an adaptation of the 1973 Stephen King novella The Boogeyman. In it, she plays Sadie, a high school student mourning the death of her mother that a demonic entity latches on to, preying on her pain. She calls her character “a loser”. Horror has become a familiar genre for her, but she doesn’t see herself as a long-term scream queen. “It’s a compliment, but I wouldn’t continue with it,” she says. “I think I might take a little break from horror. I don’t want to be restricted to one thing because nobody wants to be put in a box and I just want to explore everything.” She pauses, catching herself. “But I’m not not open,” she says with a smile. Nonetheless, she’s excited for the release of The Boogeyman. “The Stephen King movie is full-on final girl horror. It’s actually really sick. It’s rare that you leave a movie that you’re in like, ‘Good job!’” she says.
Given her rocketing success, Sophie is surprisingly self-conscious and coy about her work. “When I first saw my movie Prospect in theatres, I thought my career was over,” she says. Just 17 at the time, the act of watching herself on the big screen in a packed cinema was alien. “I thought my acting was good but the body dysmorphia…” she trails off, taking a moment. “It’s inevitable and I notice things nobody else will ever see. I still feel like that sometimes but I’m getting better at pushing that down.” She credits watching Juliette Lewis with helping her to stand up for herself and giving her a new sense of confidence.
Feeling self-conscious has also held Sophie back from sharing another of her lifelong passions: music. She’s finished an album, but the success of the show meant she was worried about people hearing it, “because it feels less lowkey.” Sophie has released four albums already via Bandcamp, but temporarily removed them from the site when Yellowjackets came out. Sophie’s sound is “noisy, dark and dreamy” and she cites Portishead, Blonde Redhead and Elliot Smith as inspirations. She’s now in a place where she’s ready for people to hear it. “I recently unprivated the albums,” she tells us. “Music is number one to me, which is why it’s more precious too. But over the next couple of months, whenever I have a couple of hours by myself, I’ll be working on music.”
That may be difficult, though, since Sophie seems to be working non-stop. “I have a movie that I’m not officially announced to be in yet but it’s super cool – very, very cool. That shoots in May. I might even have a movie before then too.” She quite rightly has big dreams for the future — admiring the paths of polymathic arthouse icons like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beatrice Dalle — and has ambitions to direct too. Then there’s the hit list of filmmakers she wants to work with at some point: Gus Van Sant, Kelly Reichardt, Lynne Ramsay… Still, she’s hesitant. “I’m not at that point, or even close to that point,” Sophie says, as if forgetting that she’s a breakout star of one of the most critically-acclaimed and watched television shows of the year. “But I hope I’ll get there.”
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Photography Miriam Marlene