“They probably kissed in the locker room.”
The Season 2 finale of Yellowjackets may have left us with a ton of heartbreak and more than a few questions, but luckily Collider’s Perri Nemiroff has been able to sit down with the cast and get answers to some of our most pressing inquiries. During the inaugural episode of Collider Forces, Nemiroff sat down with Liv Hewson who plays young Van to unpack Season 2’s many twists and turns and also explore the backstory they’ve crafted to inform their performance.
During their conversation, Nemiroff naturally brought up the relationship between Van and Taissa (Jasmine Savoy Brown). The audience is introduced to their relationship well after its inception, but prior to it being revealed to the rest of the team at the crash site — so, of course, Nemiroff asked Hewson if they had considered how that relationship started. “Yeah, we did talk about that. We talked about that a little bit,” said Hewson. And while none of the “nitty gritty specifics of it” have been nailed down as potential future canon, Hewson has a solid idea of how that romance began. They explained, “Where we’ve landed is like, well, before the plane crash, they were hooking up. I don’t think they were together. And I think that they were hooking up and not talking about it.”
While the wilderness has changed both characters in many ways, Hewson’s idea for the inception TaiVan highlights how innocent these girls were before they were stranded. It’s such a classic high school crush origin story, and we definitely want to see more of it in both timelines. Hewson went on to talk about their version of that backstory and how it informs how they play Van, saying:
“I think it’s one of those things where they were seeing each other and then privately being like, ‘This is nice. What … ah! Don’t worry about it! It’s fine,’ and then probably not saying anything. Even before we knew that Van and Taissa were gonna be a couple in the show, like when we were filming the pilot, I was always like, Van really likes Taissa. Van thinks Taissa’s really cool, so it’s like, no matter what that was always buried in there for me playing her. And then sometimes on my own I’m like, well, what I think happened is that Van realized that Taissa liked girls as well and then started teasing her on purpose [laughs], and then they probably kissed in the locker room and then never spoke about it. But I usually keep a lid on that. [Laughs].”
Where Are Taissa and Van in the Present Timeline?
Over twenty years after their plane went down, Taissa and Van are far from their happily ever after. Season 2 introduced us to adult Van, played by Lauren Ambrose, who runs a retro video store a few towns over and is struggling with a devastating cancer diagnosis. Taissa’s (Tawny Cypress) life is also in shambles after the resurgence of her sleepwalking lead her to wreck her relationship with her wife and son. Taissa found herself on Van’s doorstep in Season 2 as the former Yellowjackets are drawn back into each other’s orbit and while their relationship appeared to be well and truly over, there’s certainly still a spark between them.
Seasons 1 and 2 of Yellowjackets are currently available to stream on Showtime. Season 3 is on hold out of support for the WGA strike, but rest assured that the showrunners have a long-term plan for the series. Be sure to check out the rest of Nemiroff’s Yellowjackets interviews, and in the meantime, you can watch her chat with Hewson down below.
