‘Yellowjackets’ Cast Hosts “Funeral Parties” for Character Deaths: “It’s Often Really Heartbreaking”

Writer Ashley Lyle said she’s attended several funerals for dead characters. Creators of the Showtime series are currently hard at work on season three, and also spoke about Joel McHale joining the cast.

Yellowjackets writer Ashley Lyle revealed Sunday that the cast of the Showtime series often host “funeral parties” for each other when characters die.

“Killing off a character means nothing but good story,” Lyle said during an appearance at this weekend’s Vulture Fest. “It’s often really heartbreaking.”

Yellowjackets, which first premiered in 2021 and follows two parallel storylines of teenagers and their adult counterparts, has harbored its fair share of gruesome and emotional character deaths. Two seasons in, Travis (Andres Soto), Adam Martin (Peter Gadiot), Laura Lee (Jane Widdop), Jessica Roberts (Rekha Sharma), Jackie (Ella Purnell), Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman), Javi (Luciano Leroux), Kevyn Tan (Charlie Wright) and Natalie (Juliette Lewis) have all bid their final adieu.

“I think it’s really lovely that the actors have started having funeral parties for each other,” Lyle continued. “I’ve attended several. It’s very sweet. They’re very closely knit, particularly our younger cast.”

Lyle pointed to parties held for Leroux and Widdop as particularly memorable.

Yellowjackets, currently in production on season three, made waves its last season for the particularly hard-to-watch cannibalism scene following the death of Jackie.

“I have a pretty tough stomach, and we’ve done some weird things on the show, but I will say this season got me,” Courtney Eaton, who plays young Lottie, told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. “I almost threw up on set one of the days we were eating Jackie.”

Perhaps in keeping with the paradox of a term like “funeral party,” Lyle and her team of showrunners told THR they wanted the cannibalism to “have a sort of perversely celebratory feeling.”

“Our young cast, who knew they were about to do something intense, was, in some ways, mimicking art because they were using humor to sort of process it. There was a lot of joking around,” said Jonathan Lisco, who wrote the episode. “They called it Jackie-fruit. The whole thing was very bizarre. So there was this weird duality of reverence for what we were about to portray but also the sort of human need to make it funny in order to engage it.”

Elsewhere in the Vulture Fest interview, Lyle shared a more lighthearted story about casting Joel McHale, who will join the show for season three. Lyle saw the actor at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and did not believe it was him, recounting to the crowd, “That man is not as old as Joel McHale, because he looks incredible.”

Eventually, Lyle said she tracked down the man, and asked him if he was really McHale. “No, I’m just the world’s best paid Joel McHale impersonator,” McHale said.

The interaction ended up turning into McHale’s joining the show.

“It turns out he’s a fan of the show, and then he bought us all our merch, which was delightful,” Lyle said. When the team reached out with an offer, he responded “I thought you were just drunk and kidding.”

Lyle couldn’t reveal any further details about who McHale will play in season three, which does not yet have a release date.