Melanie Lynskey says the body shaming on the Yellowjackets set was just one person, one time
“It's been made out to be a cultural thing, but it was literally one time,” Melanie Lynskey says of comments made by a member of Yellowjackets' production team
As far as major life problems go, losing weight is pretty low on Yellowjackets protagonist Shauna Shipman’s list. Between trying to cover up the murder of her mysterious lover, grappling with the indescribable trauma of surviving for 18 months in the wilderness, and just trying to be a good mom, there’s simply not enough time in the day for physical insecurities to take precedence. But according to Melanie Lynskey—who plays adult Shauna on the Showtime thriller—that doesn’t mean a member of the Yellowjackets production team didn’t passive-aggressively comment on her weight even so.
“They were asking me, ‘What do you plan to do? I’m sure the producers will get you a trainer,” Lynskey told Rolling Stone in January. “’They’d love to help you with this.’”
Since January, that brief quip has drawn some serious (and fair) ire from Lynskey’s dedicated fan base. But as the actor tells The Independent’s Annabel Nugent in a new interview, there’s slightly more to the story.
“I feel like sometimes it’s been made out to be a cultural thing, but it was literally one time,” she says of the comment, which Lynskey attributes to a singular individual on the production team. (The fact that similar comments didn’t become a pattern may or may not have to do with how Lynskey’s co-stars Tawny Cypress, Christina Ricci, and Juliette Lewis rallied behind her—Lewis specifically wrote a letter to producers on Lynskey’s behalf.)
After the incident, Lynskey says she received an email from Yellowjackets co-creator and executive producer Ashley Lyle, a message Lynskey won’t soon forget.
“I’m going to keep it forever,” Lynskey says of Lyle’s email. “Ashley said how proud she was to have created a show where there is a regular-sized woman who is in a love triangle with two hot guys. She said that if she had seen something like this when she was a teenager, it would have changed the trajectory of her life. She said that they love me, and they love what I look like.”
Yellowjackets airs live on Showtime Sunday nights at 9:00 P.M. E.T.