Sophie Thatcher was cast as the teenage version of Nat – the shaggy-haired, Nirvana-loving, shotgun-loving badass – on yellow jackets before Juliette Lewis was cast to play the older version of the character. So in fact Thatcher is not a young Juliette Lewis; Juliette Lewis is an older version of her. “Somehow I had locked that into my memory, and the creators had reminded me of that,” Thatcher says. “It was crazy. It was really crazy.”
Of course, Thatcher is more than reverent to his elders. This Cassavetes-obsessed 21-year-old has worked to emulate the mannerisms of ‘icon’ Lewis, and the way her voice was even lower in her youth, something Thatcher can relate to, explaining that she enters this register when she is nervous. “I dug pretty deep in Reddit, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, like, my hair looks like his hair in born killers‘, Thatcher said. ‘Not everyone knows if it’s intentional or not. I don’t think it was, because I just had this blonde mullet at the time, and I decided to go for it, but maybe it is. Honestly, there are so many theories that could be true, I have no idea what’s going to happen next.”
Yes, ahead of the finale, Thatcher and her co-stars combed through the internet, sending each other speculation and memes in their group chat. When Thatcher shows up at Thrillist’s studio for her photo shoot, where her personal style is reminiscent of another ’90s cool girl, Winona Ryder in beetle juice—I explain that my colleagues and I took the BuzzFeed quiz to determine which one yellow jackets character that we are. She laughs when I tell her I’m a Shauna and explains that she got Lottie first before reverse engineering the answers to make sure she ends up with Nat.
It’s a big week for the New York-based performer, who also made her debut on this week’s episode directed by Robert Rodriguez of Boba Fett’s Book as Drash, a member of a Mos Espa street gang with a droid arm and a British accent. Her first day on set, she had to stab a mean Wookiee. “It is star wars“, she said. “It’s as intimidating as it gets.
She can’t wait to see how fans will react to the yellow jackets finale, especially the big death, but she also has her own hopes for Natalie’s future as she prepares to return to Vancouver to shoot season 2. She wants to be in more group scenes with the other girls since Nat is often with Travis (Kevin Alves), nor does she want this inevitably doomed romance to define her character. “Usually the characters I play don’t really have romances, and I think it’s interesting that they chose mine,” she says. “It gives her a certain vulnerability and a softness and then it gives older Natalie more trauma. I think it’s just going to get worse. I mean it has to do it. But I hope that’s not all for Natalie for season 2, because I think she has so many possibilities in her emotions and abilities, I don’t want to see her just destroyed by a boy when someone gives birth and people die.
Thatcher, a Chicago native, shot down the pilot of yellow jackets before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. When the show was picked up as a series, she and her castmates returned to Canada from isolation and instantly bonded. “I remember we had this big FaceTime, with all the younger actors. I was like, ‘Jesus, these will be my people for the next five months,'” Thatcher said. “In the first two days of filming, it was pretty manic, and everyone was really excited to be with each other, and it’s also just heightened emotions, because everyone had been isolated. for so long.”
While Thatcher is a bit more private with her social media posts, her castmates have flooded the web with documentation of their off-hours silliness. Thatcher became famous for her karaoke parties, some solo and some with the rest of her fake football team. (You may even see a bit of a posted on Instagram by Jasmin Savoy Brown, aka Young Taissa.) At one point, the chanting got so loud that Thatcher nearly got kicked out of her Airbnb. Its going to karaoke songs? “Criminal” by Fiona Apple; “Superstar,” “Rainy Days and Mondays” and “Close to You” by The Carpenters; and musical theater for good measure.
I ask Thatcher about a video Alves put on her feed, showing her and her co-stars acting very silly after they commandeer her phone after leaving it unattended. Someone extracted the footage and captioned it on Twitter: “girls before they eat you.” “This video, it just shows that I would get really manic on set,” she says. “I became another version of myself that was the at the antipodes of Natalie. I had to bring levity all the time.” Thatcher says appear like she’s in a bad mood, even the art she Instagram posts are thematically dark– this is not its only quality. She was also the girl who sang Sondheim on set with Brown and Liv Hewson, who plays Van.
Although she admits she looked like Natalie in high school, Thatcher is adamant that she’s not the aloof rebel she made a name for on screen. “I’m not that,” she said. “I’m not that at all, but I can act. I was thrown into this world pretty quickly, because of my outward appearance, the way I present myself and my tastes. So the casting directors have immediately thought of me that way. think it’s interesting, but I really don’t want to be stuck in this. I just want to explore.
That said, she, for the moment, will not depart from the hairstyle which becomes her signature. One person on Twitter even called it the “the coolest mullet of the year.” “I can’t let go,” she said. “I’m always like, ‘I’m going to grow it. I’m so sick of being famous for a mullet. Now it’s super common, and I know it sounds like hipster bullshit, but everyone has it. Every time I try to do that, I get really bored, and then I cut my hair, so there you go. shag stays a bit.”
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