Juliette Lewis might be back on Yellowjackets, but it won't be any time soon
Sorry, Yellowjackets fans. We won't see Natalie, Shauna, or any of the girls until at least next year.
Sure, Showtime’s Yellowjackets, which was nominated for three awards last night, wasn’t the Emmys’ most egregious snub. (That was obviously Better Call Saul, which set a record for most Emmy losses last night with 53 total nominations and 0 wins.) Still, followers of the Wilderness can rest assured that our girls will have at least one more shot to win some of those well-earned statuettes. It just won’t be any time in 2024.
Yellowjackets won’t return to either civilization or our TV screens until 2025, Deadline reports. Back in May, series co-creator Ashley Lyle tweeted that the writers strike had shut down pre-production for the season after just one day. Luckily, as of September, the writers room is back up and running and penning horrors we can only imagine for the remaining surviving members of the stranded soccer team. (No word yet on that elusive bonus episode, which Lyle promised would air sometime between seasons two and three back in June. Hopefully that promise doesn’t meet the same fate as season one’s pit girl.)
Speaking of surviving characters, we may see a surprise return from one who didn’t. Spoiler alert! Even though the adult version of Natalie, played by Juliette Lewis, died in the show’s present-day timeline (Yellowjackets alternates between now and 1996) during the series’ season two finale, Lewis and the writers aren’t closing the door on her arc completely. “I don’t know anything, but I think that’s a good idea,” the actor said when asked about a potential return, either in a flashback or some other form, at the Emmys last night (via The Hollywood Reporter). “We’ll see what happens.”
While director Karyn Kusama had previously stated that Natalie’s death was pre-ordained all the way back in the pilot, she isn’t ruling anything out either. “What I’ve learned about Ashley and Bart [Nickerson] and Jonathan [Lisco] is that they are kind of a never-say-never group,” she said in a May interview with THR. “I find they’re always super open to imagining things if it drives the story into an interesting place.”
Whether or not Lewis actually make a re-appearance, the actor hasn’t spoken much about her character’s fate since the season wrapped, so its nice to finally hear how she felt about the way it all went down. “I thought they wrapped up the characters really beautifully, and I just love good writing, so I was happy to be a part of it,” she said. If this is, indeed, goodbye, she added that she’ll “miss my cast.” “Such a good group of girls, I love them so much,” she concluded. “They’re going to do amazing.”