Summary

On this new episode of Collider Forces, Liv Hewson returns to the show to discuss Yellowjackets Season 3.

During their Forces conversation with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Hewson pinpoints the moment in Season 3 when everything changes for Van.

They also explain how they tackled crucial scenes in Episode 9, “How the Story Ends.”

Yellowjackets has a phenomenal team at the helm. Showrunners Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco do a top-tier job steering the ship. However, one thing that’s been apparent since the very beginning is how much their ensemble cares about their characters. It’s a level of passion, dedication and collaboration that undoubtedly bolsters their presence in the show and their impact on the narrative. A prime example of that? How Liv Hewson changed the game for their character, Van Palmer.
In May 2023, Hewson became the very first guest on Collider Forces, a show they inspired. Collider Forces is a Collider Ladies Night spin-off series designed to use a similar style of conversation to highlight even more need-to-know voices in this industry, ones that are changing it for the better. Hewson’s inspired significant change in recent years. Change for themself, change for non-binary representation in Hollywood, and also a significant change to the Yellowjackets narrative.
‘Yellowjackets’ Changed Liv Hewson – Professionally and Personally

“To have carried the character to the place that she’s in now, I feel a much more stable sense of what I’m able to accomplish with her.”

As we near the end of Season 3, it’s impossible to imagine a version of Yellowjackets that didn’t include Liv Hewson and Van Palmer after Season 1. However, that was the original game plan.
While discussing their journey with the series thus far, Hewson began, “Yellowjackets is really special because, over the course of time that we’ve been doing this job, I really feel that I have changed a lot and that I have self-actualized a lot, both on a personal level and a professional level.” They continued, “In between the start and now, I’ve become so much more explicit about my non-binary identity publicly, [and] my relationship to my body is completely different.” Addressing their experience on a creative level, they added:

“I don’t think it’s a secret at this stage that Van wasn’t going to be in it forever. So, when we started Yellowjackets, I really felt sort of scurried in a corner, not because anyone had put me there, but because I felt like, ‘Okay, I’m just gonna do my thing over here, and then hopefully somebody sees it. If I’m here for a short time, I’m gonna do the best I can. But, I think this character is very interesting!’ I was sort of getting away with as much as I could. And then now, to be in the position that I’m in on the show and to have carried the character to the place that she’s in now, I feel a much more stable sense of what I’m able to accomplish with her and within the story. I feel much more secure and secure in myself.”

Liv Hewson Gets Emotional Watching Lauren Ambrose Play Van

“It’s always been so emotional for me that Van grows up, that she survives.”

Image via Paramount+

Not only did Van Palmer go on to survive the 90s timeline of Season 1, but ultimately, it was also confirmed that she was one of the few survivors of the wilderness. Season 2 of Yellowjackets introduced Hewson’s present day counterpart, none other than Emmy, Tony and Grammy nominee, Lauren Ambrose.

“When we were filming Season 2, one of her first days on set working as Van, we were on sound stages for all of Season 2 because the snow’s not real, so the ‘90s cast finished in the cabin, and then Lauren and Tawny [Cypress] were still working on a different sound stage, and I was like, ‘Okay, good night, everybody,’ and then I snuck onto the sound stage and sat with the writers. So, pretty early on, from Lauren’s beginning and working with all of us, I was like, ‘No, I’d love to go and look, actually! I will go and watch.’ And it was a head trip. She’s so good. It was always very emotional watching her as Van, because it’s always been so emotional for me that Van grows up, that she survives. That’s always been really sentimental for me.”

On top of the emotional weight of knowing their character makes it home, the addition of Ambrose to the ensemble also gave Hewson an invaluable tool for charting Van’s wilderness evolution. They explained:

“There were a couple of scenes in this season where I was like, ‘Oh, this is the beginning of Lauren’s Van. Oh, cool. I can see where some of these threads are starting for me.’ And it’s really a gift to be given a roadmap like that as an actor, especially from such a skilled actor as Lauren. It’s like, ‘Okay, I know where I’m going, and that’s cool, too.’”

Does Van Really Think Ben Burned Down the Cabin?

“I don’t think that Van, to her core, believes anything.”

8:13

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While having such a roadmap is handy, it’s still challenging to navigate a narrative riddled with mystery, deception, and even supernatural suspicions. However, that’s where Hewson’s understanding of their character makes all the difference.
For example, does Van really believe Ben (Steven Krueger) burned down the cabin? Is that why she’s so willing to vote him guilty and then encourage Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) to complete the execution? No, but Hewson is well aware of the critical component that drives Van to make such decisions.

“I don’t think she does, to her core, believe that Ben did it. I don’t think Van knows what she believes in the same way that I don’t think, to her core, Van believes that eating Javi was the right thing to do. I don’t think that Van, to her core, believes anything, but Van believes what she has to believe in order to survive, in order to make it out, make it through the experience they’re having. I think, in her mind, she’s doing everybody else a favor. The monologue in the first episode and the buffering Tai through shooting Ben sort of dramatically fulfill the same purpose to me, which is setting the story straight for everyone, getting everybody on the same page, like, ‘Here’s what’s going on, here’s how we all feel about it, and it’s gonna be fine, okay?’ Because any alternative possibility would be life-shattering.”

Van’s ability to put those blinders on and do what she can to steer the group away from such life-shattering realizations is, according to Hewson, a key reason why the character survives the wilderness.

“I have my own, much less drastic real-world experience of this, and I think a lot of people do, which is when you’re in the middle of a really traumatic situation, you have blinders on. You are not yourself, and you’re not behaving as you would normally behave. You do and think and say and believe whatever you have to tell yourself in order to make it out the other side, and that’s a very powerful survival drive that I actually think is admirable. I think it’s difficult, and I think it causes a lot of pain, and it’s hard, but without that kind of drive, I don’t know that Van would have made it out.”

The Moment When Everything Changes for Van

“That’s how you get the adjustment from, ‘Let your brother save you,’ to, ‘We ate a fucking kid.’”

Image via Paramount+

For much of Season 3, Van heavily embraces her role as a skilled storyteller and deftly steers the surviving Yellowjackets toward a more manageable way of processing what they’ve done. However, that all changes with the arrival of Edwin (Nelson Franklin), Hannah (Ashley Sutton), and Kodiak (Joel McHale).

“There’s the narrativizing that she does for herself, for Travis, trying to convince him to eat Javi, with the monologue for everybody, trying to get Taissa to shoot Ben, and being like, ‘I am gonna make sure that we have a group theory about this that makes it survivable for everyone.’ That is completely upended by the arrival of the scientists. It completely changes everything. The line that Van has of, ‘We are going home,’ that’s the first time that’s occurred to her. ‘Oh my god, I’ve been telling myself the wrong story about this the whole time. Oh, fuck, we’re going home! Oh, that’s different. That is a completely different story to the one that I’ve been telling myself and telling everybody else. So, now what? Now, how do I live with what we’ve done out here, what I’ve done, what I’ve told everybody, what I’ve told myself about it?” Now it’s intolerable. Now it’s intolerable to stay, it’s intolerable to confront or think about. That’s how you get the adjustment from, ‘Let your brother save you,’ to, ‘We ate a fucking kid.’ It’s like,’Holy fuck, we’re going home!’”

Identifying that major shift in the character was quite easy for Hewson courtesy of a single line of dialogue. When the scientists arrive at their camp in Episode 7, “Croak,” Van blurts out, “We’re going home,” before the show cuts to the opening credits.

“When I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, great. I get it. I know exactly the switch that I’m gonna carry Van through making for the rest of the season.’ What I thought was beautiful about it is I’m like, ‘I don’t think other people are gonna expect that out of Van.’ As the rest of the scripts started coming in, it’s like by the time we get to the finale, Van’s out. Van’s out. With the introduction of Van in the present, Lauren’s Van is out. She’s like, ‘I don’t want anything to do with any of this.’ So I knew that that would be coming for me at some point, an adjustment from, ‘This is all I believe,’ to, ‘Get away from me.’ Okay, that, at some point, is going to happen. I didn’t expect it to happen this soon or this dramatically, but it makes complete sense to me that it would happen that quickly and dramatically once the possibility of going home is introduced.”

Why Is Van So Eager to Call Her Mom?

“I have been thinking about Van and her mom since we shot the pilot.”

Image via Paramount+

Another line Van gets in that particular episode that comes as a bit of a shock is when she and Tai find the scientists’ satellite phone. Without hesitation, Van says, “I’m gonna try my mom.” After admitting I was quite surprised to hear Van say that of all things, Hewson admitted, “Me too,” and then continued:

“I have been thinking about Van and her mom since we shot the pilot. Van slapping her mom awake was a real North Star for me in terms of her character development in the early stages of the show, where I was like, what’s one of the things I know about this person? It’s that her home life is unstable, and she’s comfortable with violence, and she doesn’t have support. One of the things that Bart [Nickerson] told me in Season 1 was, ‘Well, Van’s very Al-Anon,’ and I was like, ‘Got it.’ So, I’ve been thinking about Van and her mom for a really long time, and I always kind of hoped that we would come back around to addressing Van’s home environment and how that explains some of the way that she behaves with everybody the rest of the time, and this was a really beautiful hint of it. What I really appreciated about it was that, the audience knows what Van’s mom is like. The others don’t, necessarily. I don’t think Van talks about her mom. But, the notion of, ‘I’m going to try my mom,’ it’s a moment, and I think there are a lot of moments like this in Season 3, that underscore how young they are, how young everybody is. I think that was really important that, yeah, Van knows who her mom is, but she’s a kid and she’s lost and she doesn’t have anybody else to try.”

That particular turn in Hewson’s portrayal of Van in the final episodes of Season 3 is downright exquisite. After all this time and after everything they’ve done, it’s easy to forget that the Yellowjackets are so young. Van, in particular, has always been a rather mature and formidable figure within the group. After the scientists create a crack in that composure, Hewson’s ability to let that vulnerability and innocence seep in serves as a necessary and deeply emotional reminder that they’re just kids.
Liv Hewson on Sharing the Screen with Lauren Ambrose

There’s a big difference between the scene in Episode 7 and the ones in Episode 9.

Image via Paramount+

More emotions come flooding in in Episode 9, which is one of the most heart-wrenching episodes of the series thus far. “How the Story Ends” is the end of present day Van’s journey, and Hewson wanted to do everything in their power to ensure the character got the best possible send-off.
In Episode 7, Hewson gets an opportunity that they advocated for. They get to share the screen with Ambrose. “The scenes between Lauren and I are so important to me. They’re such a special part of this season.” Not only do they share a scene in Episode 7, but they’re in quite a few together in Episode 9, too. While both are dream sequences, Hewson isolated a key difference between the two. They began:

“Thematically, to me, how I understood them is that the scene in 7 is a nightmare, which is why, I, in that scene, am much more sort of distant and not that kind and not that friendly. That is the nightmare of somebody in hospital who knows she’s dying and is scared, and feels this horrible experience coming up to crash onto her again.”

The scenes in Episode 9, however, are the polar opposite. “I really understood those as Van’s inner child ushering her through the experience of dying.” They continued, “I don’t think younger Van is necessarily literally in those scenes. I think it’s an imagining of her. But, I did imagine younger Van as a part of her in those scenes that is stepping up to make sure she’s okay as she’s dying.”
Hewson further elaborated:

“As a young Van in those scenes, I want to make sure that the older Van’s okay. I want to make sure she’s okay, and I’m proud of her and I love her, and I think she’s cool. It truly is like yourself as a teenager visiting you as an adult. People ask me that all the time. ‘Oh, what would you say to yourself when you were younger if you could say anything?’ And it’s always a really emotional question. So, those scenes, I think, were an opportunity to play out a dynamic like that. What is cool is that Lauren’s Van is not comfortable with Van in the wilderness. That is a part of herself that she, I think, feels a great deal of shame about and potential resentment of, and she’s not integrated or comfortable with what she’s done or who she was then. But young Van adores Van in the present because, you made it. You made it out, and I’m going to look after you now.”

What’s Up With Those ‘Yellowjackets’ Plane Scenes?

“I didn’t feel caught up in the dream logic.”

Image via Showtime

Jumping to the tail end of that episode, we make our way to a location that we now associate with present day characters passing courtesy of Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) death in Season 2. It’s the plane. Hewson does have their own way of processing the “dream logic” of such a location, which you can hear about in the video at the top of this article, but when it came to filming that particular scene, the key was letting those kinds of concerns go.

“They gave me a real gift in the writing of that scene, which is that young Van just gets to talk to Van in the present about how proud she is of her. There was a real sense of apology in that scene where it’s like, ‘Yeah, I did send you in there, and I did know you were gonna die’ — I remember, I asked if I could add that in the scene where Lauren says, ‘You said I was gonna be some kind of hero,’ and then my Van says, ‘You are. You saved them.’ The gift of that scene to me is, I didn’t feel caught up in the dream logic of what the plane is or where this part of Van is coming from or what this liminal space means. That all sort of really fell away for me. The important piece of this is to look after her, and say sorry and be sorry, but to make sure she knows that she did a great job.”

Hewson then added, “That scene, I just felt from young Van to present day Van, so much love. It just is like, man, Van Palmer, you mean the world to me. I just remember thinking that.”
Looking for even more from Hewson? You can watch the entirety of our near-hourlong chat in the video at the top of this article.

Yellowjackets

Release Date

November 14, 2021

Network

Showtime, Paramount+ with Showtime

Showrunner

Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco

Directors

Benjamin Semanoff, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Deepa Mehta, Eduardo Sánchez, Jeffrey W. Byrd, Liz Garbus, Scott Winant, Eva Sørhaug, Jamie Travis

Writers

Liz Phang, Sarah L. Thompson, Ameni Rozsa

Yellowjackets is available to stream on Paramount+.
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