I don’t have a big, booming voice,” says Melanie Lynskey in a Kiwi accent that is the antithesis of big and booming. “It’s high and quite quiet so I think it’s easy for people to make assumptions.” People have been making assumptions about Lynskey for decades now. Each time, she upends them. She implodes them. In fact, she’s so good at it that “not who you expect” has become her calling card as an actor. “We’re taught that power is in masculinity, and I don’t agree with that. Feminine traits are also powerful,” she says. “I think soft-spoken people can carry a lot of things within them.”
Lynskey, 45, is living, breathing, softly speaking – now, latte-sipping – proof of that. She was 16 when she landed her first role opposite a then-upcoming star Kate Winslet. Together, they played the intensely entwined, murderous schoolgirls of Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). Even then, Jackson innately understood something about Lynskey’s allure – a glimmer of danger never totally out of sight. It flickers across the length of her career, from her 12-year stint opposite Charlie Sheen (and later Ashton Kutcher) on the sitcom Two and a Half Men to last month’s episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, in which she played a merciless rebel leader. No doubt, that glimmer is the crux of her performance in Showtime’s series Yellowjackets, which has returned for a thrilling second season.
