Juliette Lewis is sure that she’s seen a ghost. In 1991, as a teenager filming Cape Fear—one of the ’90s films that would put her on the map—she was staying in a Fort Lauderdale hotel by herself and would fall asleep feeling like someone was hovering over her bed. “It wasn’t a nice ghost,” she recalls. “It was an asshole ghost. It would be standing over my bed with a knife or whatever, and I’d be scared.” One day she was in the room when the TV turned spontaneously to a channel that was showing the horror film Jacob’s Ladder. “If you’re really a ghost, change the channel,” she called out. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the channels started flipping. She sat on the bed and felt someone sitting next to her. “It was totally terrifying,” she recalls. “I think it was legit.”
As a kid, Lewis was interested in talking to ghosts. (In that hotel room, she called her dad, who told her to simply ask the ghost to leave.) At 49, however, she’s more intrigued by real-life spookiness: “I like stuff based on a true story, about how people turned out the way they did. That’s the gripping thing about Yellowjackets: How did this group of girls become A, B, and C?”
By “A,” she might mean housewife-cum-murdering-philanderer who skins rabbits for sport; “B,” aspiring politician making blood sacrifices in her basement; and “C,” twisted, true-crime-obsessed nursing-home employee holding a woman captive in her home. The first season of Showtime’s Yellowjackets—which accumulated a rabid fan base in short order—gave us these characters in the form of four middle-aged women still grappling with the high school trauma of surviving 19 months in the woods after a plane crash with their soccer team. The details of how they survived unravel slowly—sometimes unsatisfyingly—throughout the first 10 episodes of the show. “I have to say that the writers beautifully know how to navigate answering something but then also give you a new angle of a mystery,” says Lewis.
The actor is seated in a hotel suite outside of Los Angeles, a meeting point between the city and the mountain town where she moved during the pandemic. She’s in red workout leggings, blue New Balance sneakers, and a dark denim top; two bottles of essential oils she blended to help her relax sit on a nearby table, waiting for an opportunity to be spritzed. (“Don’t you feel refreshed?” she asks after spraying one that smells like spearmint.)
A week earlier, Lewis returned from Vancouver after six months of shooting the second season of Yellowjackets. She resumed her role as Natalie Scatorccio, one of the four leads and the one who wears her trauma most visibly—in the form of violent outbursts, manipulation, and numbing out with drugs and alcohol. (The character’s younger version is played by Sophie Thatcher.) The first season saw Natalie “vacillating between rage and apathy,” as Lewis puts it. “There’s a lot of heaviness to her. I didn’t want to play her like a light and cool girl, even though there are aspects to her that could be like that. I wanted to unearth the humanity: a person who is really struggling with wanting to live or not.”
The first season culminates with Natalie, gun in mouth, on the precipice of that question before a mysterious group abducts her. When I reference this ending, Lewis seems surprised and says, “Oh, right, she also gets kidnapped. I was just thinking about the gun.” Lewis doesn’t watch her work: “I don’t want to think about something I can’t do anything about—meaning, if I would have made other choices, or the editing, or all of the other things that are out of my control. I guess I don’t want to be disappointed, so I don’t bother.”
She was shocked when she learned about the turn Natalie’s character would take. “I wish I would have known,” she says. “I come from movies, where you know your beginning, middle, and end.” While shooting the first season, Lewis had to get used to finding out her character’s fate just a few weeks before she’d film it. “When I know where my character is going, it actually helps me make braver choices and I know what not to telegraph. I can keep it grounded,” she explains. “Say I don’t know there’s drama coming up; I might play a scene way more dramatically when it should be cooler emotionally.”
This season, Lewis learned Natalie’s entire arc in advance. “The way I describe her in the second season is that she’s a composite of guilt, shame, and denial, and then she’s seeking redemption. So there’s a lift in her that’s not there in the first season.” Given the secrecy surrounding the show, even this vague intel feels like the launch of a thousand Reddit threads. “You should see the list about what we can and cannot talk about,” says Lewis. “Basically, don’t open your mouth.”
She can, however, make known her love of the cast. Since Yellowjackets debuted, it’s been no secret that the adult leads—Lewis; Christina Ricci, who plays Misty Quigley; Tawny Cypress, who plays Taissa Turner; and Melanie Lynsky, who plays Shauna Sadecki—have developed a rapport that extends beyond the (very long) filming days. “I missed them right away,” Lewis says of leaving the women when filming concluded the previous week. “I’ve never worked with this many girls together. None of us has. It’s really rich, and we all work very similarly—no nonsense. None of us is pretentious. We all have a lethal sense of humor. Really dry.”
Some of their shared camaraderie stems from the fact that they’re all women in their 40s with similar cultural references—and an aversion to night shoots. “We sloth in, going, ‘Oh my God, I have anxiety. How are we going to get through this?’” she says of the filming days that began at 4 p.m. and ended as the sun was coming up at 6.
Those moments were typically when Lewis would pull out her speaker, a small teal JBL cylinder she carries with her in the back of cabs, makeup chairs, and, apparently, interviews. “Music is my life’s pulse,” she says, producing the speaker from her bag. “I have what I call a psychic radio.” She walked into the hotel that morning listening to Madonna’s “Holiday” and Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow.”
On one particular night shoot for Yellowjackets, the speaker was critical. “We needed the laughs,” she recalls. “We weren’t doing anything that was too complicated; I think it was dancing around a fire.” Then she stops herself: “I hope I’m not giving anything away.” The “older ladies,” as Lewis puts it, started playing Trivial Pursuit (a version focused on the ’70s, so Lewis says she was useless; the ’80s would have been a different story). Lewis had just lost a friend, so she put on songs they used to listen to together, and the other women added their favorites—a mishmash of aughts and ’90s hits. Can you imagine being there while Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynsky, and Juliette Lewis sang along to “One Headlight” by the Wallflowers, “These Are Days” by 10,000 Maniacs, and “Reckoner” by Radiohead?
“Nobody’s asking for my music,” Lewis clarifies, “but I bring it just to lighten the mood every now and then. I may have interrupted a serious scene Lauren Ambrose and Tawny were doing.” (Ambrose joined the cast as the adult Vanessa Palmer, “Van.”) “But I just walked out like John Cusack with my speaker.”
Lewis was pleasantly surprised by the positive response to her Season 1 performance. She doesn’t read reviews—“More so than when I was 30, or even 40, I just don’t have expectations,” she says—but the reaction to her work has been brought to her attention by other people. “One of the most valuable lessons that I learned after the success of Yellowjackets was that I was so in fear of being typecast that I worried people wouldn’t know what goes into a character like this. Natalie is nothing like myself. But because there’s certain things, like ‘tough’ and ‘wrong side of the tracks’ or whatever, people think it’s something I’ve played before, but I haven’t. It took me like 30 years for people to go, ‘Wow, she does unpredictable stuff, and it’s high quality.’”
Lewis mostly gets asked about Yellowjackets in airports and supermarkets—usually by women, many of whom are looking for spoilers. She hasn’t read any of the internet forums dissecting elaborate conspiracy theories about the show, but she occasionally sees them floating around on Instagram (where she’s typically posting about punk rock: “I like a sense of lawlessness”).
“There’s one theory that’s coming up that all will be revealed—or some of it will be revealed,” she says. “The woods. A general ‘What do they do out there?’” She understands how fans feel, scraping for clues about the show. “How I relate to what people might go through with Yellowjackets is that there are certain thrillers or magic tricks that have driven me crazy. If it’s too much, I’m out,” she says. “Like The Staircase? That fucking guy. Or Making a Murderer? That one was sad.”
Remaining in Natalie’s headspace is a challenge. “Here’s the thing,” says Lewis. “I’m a professional, but it’s hard. I glance back and I’m like, do I smile once in five months in a scene?” When she first dove into the character in May of 2021, she was going through a hard time: post–Covid lockdown, post-breakup. She put some of that energy into her character.
She’s in a better place now but still took breaks from Natalie. During filming, she flew home when she could, hatched a plan to grow a garden for essential oils, starred in a Skims campaign, hiked a lot, got vitamin IVs (“I’m a crazy health person”), and tended to her knee injury—a result of years of throwing herself around stages with her band, Juliette and the Licks. “When you’re older—you know, I’m almost 50—the most valuable things are time and health.”
After more than three decades, she approaches work differently. “Early on, there’s so many things you’re not in control of, and then later, you start being in control of what you want to be. I’m not so dependent,” Lewis says. “I’m OK if I don’t work. I guess the big difference is the hustle is different. I don’t hustle. I know the value of what I contribute. That’s huge. It’s not even whether it sounds arrogant or not, but it’s earned.”
A turkey sandwich, chips, and guacamole are waiting for Lewis from room service—and so is a dresser, somewhere nearby, that she’s had her eye on and is going to see in person. “I’m late to homemaking,” she explains. We stand and make our way to the door, and when I say I can’t wait to see the second season, Lewis replies knowingly, “I can’t wait to hear what you think. You’re going to freak out at the ending. It’s neat,” she says, smiling. “No one will see it coming.”
Molly Creeden is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.
