‘Yellowjackets’ Cast Members Aren’t Happy About These Surprise Deaths

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 9 of Yellowjackets. 

We’re still one episode out from the Season 3 finale of Yellowjackets, but it’s the end of the road for one fan-favorite character. After living through a plane crash, a wolf attack, a cannibalistic wilderness cult, and metastatic cancer, a now-adult Van Palmer (Lauren Ambrose, played as a teen by Liv Hewson) meets an unexpected demise: she’s murdered by Melissa (Hilary Swank), who she and the other wilderness survivors believed long-dead. Melissa may have faked her own suicide, changed her name, and sworn she left the wilderness behind, but just minutes into Swank’s surprise appearance, she returns to her wilderness roots, stabbing Van through the heart in the episode’s final seconds. 

One fan who isn’t too happy about Van’s sudden death? Lauren Ambrose herself. Speaking to Vanity Fair after the episode aired, Ambrose, who joined the cast in Season 2, said she felt “lured in” when accepting the role, believing her stint in the cast would be longer. 

Both Ambrose and Tawny Cypress, who plays the adult version of Van’s lover, Taissa, expressed disappointment over Van’s fate, especially after the character’s poignant arc surviving the wilderness only to develop terminal cancer. “I assumed it would be the cancer that did her in,” said Ambrose, “this ultimate survivor who is unable to survive this real and human thing… Then it wasn’t that, and reading it was really shocking. All of a sudden, Hilary Swank is murdering me. I’m like, ‘Okay, we’re going to make it work.’” So while she didn’t completely approve of how the writers handled her character, Ambrose said she leaned on advice from friend Kathryn Hahn: “Champions adjust.” 

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Ambrose also said that after the writers informed her of Van’s upcoming death, she requested, “Please make it earned and worthy of this character that Liv [Hewson] invented.” In response, Cypress told Vanity Fair, “When I read it, it did not feel earned, quite honestly, and I didn’t really understand it.” Cypress said she now understands Van was killed off to make room for Melissa (Swank), and explained, “You just have to have faith and trust that [the writers] know what the f*** they’re doing… I love the story that we got to tell.” However, she added, “As a fan, I’d have liked it to have gone differently for sure—and as a fan of Lauren, I would have liked for her to stick around.” 

This isn’t the first time a Yellowjackets cast member publicly expressed their disappointment in the series. In February, Simone Kessell, who played the adult version of Lottie (played as a teen by Courtney Eaton), told Variety she was “brokenhearted” about her character’s sudden death, saying, “I was excited that Season 3 would take [Lottie] somewhere interesting, and unfortunately, they just decided that storyline was no longer.” 

In the same interview, Kessel took direct shots at the show’s writers, saying, “I don’t know what happened in that writers’ room… As an actor, you always think, ‘Was it something I did?” She also said she felt Lottie’s death was “premature” and that “to have [her storyline] just cut off didn’t feel good.” 

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After the interview, Kessel raised some eyebrows when she commiserated with disappointed fans over Lottie’s fate, liking an Instagram comment that called Lottie’s death “one of the biggest failures in that writing room,” and another that read, “I’m sorry these writers didn’t appreciate your commitment and talent enough to write a well-developed story. You deserve better and I hope you find it.” Kessel even responded to one critical fan, replying with a laughing emoji to a comment that read, “What an odd [choice], very disappointing one…I don’t get it, [makes] no sense. Hopefully Lottie’s ghost will haunt writer’s room.” 

These reactions from the Season 3 cast are a stark difference from the last time we lost a major character, when Natalie (Juliette Lewis) died at the end of Season 2. At the time, Lewis told Variety she “very much knew” about her character’s death ahead of time and had expected to have a limited run on the show, explaining, “I think I’m good for a series for two seasons.”

However, Lewis has also expressed her frustration with the Yellowjackets writers in the past. In 2021, during a panel discussion at VultureFest, Lewis said of her character, “Natalie was really depressing to play. She’s a de-evolution. I didn’t know that. Everyone here is so beyond talented and wonderful… the show is awesome, but my character is like, ugh… I showed up, I did the best I could, it wasn’t what I expected.” Lewis then walked out of the panel early, sparking rumors that she may have been frustrated with her role. 

In 2022, ahead of starting production on the show’s second season, Lewis wrote in an Instagram Story, “I hope Natalie gets written in the way I thought she would when I signed on.” Lewis reiterated this idea the following week, tweeting, “I would like to see her be the kind of person I was initially pitched—a chameleon who can become other people because she’s a brilliant manipulator.” After Season 2 aired, however, Lewis told Variety, “I think the writing team is so phenomenal. They had many storylines that were always to be realized, and so that’s what they’re doing.” 

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All this shock and disappointment from the cast might come as a surprise to longtime fans of Yellowjackets, as co-creators Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle have repeatedly maintained that they’ve already planned out a five-season arc for the series. However, it’s unclear whether any of these character deaths were part of that initial plan. While promoting Season 2 in 2023, Lyle told Entertainment Weekly that while the series at that point was “largely what we always planned,” there’s “always room for things,” and added, “you do make a lot of discoveries along the way and so it’s always a little bit surprising.” Considering the recent comments from Ambrose, Cypress, and Kessel about Season 3, it seems those discoveries aren’t always popular among the cast.