A scene at the end ofYellowjackets’ latest episode was so gory that it caused several castmembers to throw up while filming it.
The hit Showtime drama returned to screens on 26 March, with the second episode in the series, “Edible Complex”, airing last night (2 April) on Paramount Plus.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for season two, episode two of Yellowjackets.
Towards the end of the previous episode, viewers caught a glimpse of Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) taking a bite of the late Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) ear, in the 1990s flashback timeline.
Episode two saw the teenagers burn Jackie’s body – or so they thought, until snow fell on the searing corpse, leaving it perfectly cooked. The show proceeded to show them gorging on the corpse out of pure starvation.
Sophie Nélisse, who plays the younger Shauna, told Entertainment Weekly: “Even though we were eating fake, like, rice paper, the image was so vivid. What we were picking at seemed so real that our brains couldn’t decipher and we were all gagging as soon as they called cut. It was gross.”
Jasmin Savoy Brown (who plays Taissa) also spoke about the props. “It was rice paper for the skin and then the inside was jackfruit,” she said. “The consistency felt like flesh. A couple people threw up.”
Yellowjackets focuses on a group of New Jersey high school soccer players who get lost in the wilderness when their plane crashes over Canada. The timeline oscillates between their trying to stay alive in the harsh wilderness, and their lives 25 years later after the survivors returned to society.
Showrunner and executive producer Jonathan Lisco said: “One of our many mantras is that the show is not about whether cannibalism [happens]. We tell you that in the pilot. It’s about why.”
