Why Melanie Lynskey Was ‘Excited’ To Tackle Dark Roles On Yellowjackets & The Last Of Us

When you consider Melanie Lynskey’s nearly 100 acting credits, it’s easy to forget where the performer got her start. Though she’s widely known for guest-starring on sitcoms like “Young Sheldon,” “Mom,” and “Two and a Half Men,” Lynskey’s first role was as the real-life killer Pauline Parker in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures.” That film saw her character hatch a plan with her best friend, Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), to murder her mother with a brick.

With that in mind, it feels largely appropriate that Lynskey has been seen most recently on two of the grimmest shows on TV. She played the militant rebel and vengeful killer Kathleen on HBO’s apocalyptic series “The Last of Us,” and can currently be found on Showtime’s cannibal drama “Yellowjackets,” where she is the leading protagonist, Shauna, in the modern timeline.

For her part, Lynskey has largely appreciated her return to playing darker roles on those popular series. In fact, she told The Hollywood Reporter as much when she sat down for a round table with several other notable actors. “Yeah, I didn’t have reservations about the material; I was excited,” she recalled. “I was excited to read something in all of those cases where it was a woman who was going through it, and it was being shown.”

Melanie Lynskey finds these darker roles to be freeing

ye

Even in light of the dark roles that Melanie Lynskey has had in the FX crime drama, “The Shield,” or Netflix’s melancholic “I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore,” her most recent characters still feel especially grim. After all, Kathleen shows no compunction about mass killings or child murder on “The Last of Us,” and Shauna is dealing with PTSD from murdering and eating her friends as a teen on “Yellowjackets.”

Still, the actor has embraced the messiness and nastiness of her troubled characters and has said that she finds it somewhat freeing after a career of trying so hard to be liked. “It’s exhausting to try to be likable, and I think, as like a young working actress just auditioning and auditioning trying to be likable, trying to fit myself into whatever box people needed me to be in, um, just was so tiring,” Lynskey explained to The Hollywood Reporter. “I was really grateful to be like, oh, this is a person who doesn’t care how people see her.”

Though Kathleen was ultimately killed off after a two-episode stint on “The Last of Us,” Lynskey’s haunted survivor, Shauna, will no doubt be returning for Season 3 of “Yellowjackets.” Furthermore, given how intense Season 2 was, viewers can likely expect to see Lynskey go to even darker places with her character in Season 3.