How Tawny Cypress told a ‘beautiful story of love’ while channeling ‘Other Tai’ in ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3
“I had a really great scene partner for the whole of the season. It was a joy to work with Lauren Ambrose. We got to tell this beautiful story of love — and a little obsession,” Cypress tells Gold Derby. “I think I got to do some really great acting this season. They gave me some really great material, and it was a lot of fun to play Taissa this season. It was the most fun I’ve had so far.”
By the beginning of the Showtime drama’s third season, Taissa has completely blown up her life. Having become the first state senator to “impeach herself” before taking office, she has destroyed any chance she had at a political career, and she has alienated her family to the point where her estranged wife, Simone (Rukiya Bernard), will no longer allow Taissa to see their son, Sammy (Aiden Stoxx). But this is exactly what Taissa wanted. Unburdened by the demands and expectations of her once candy-coated life, she can now be her true self and live out her relationship with her true love, a terminal cancer-ridden Van (Ambrose), who is residing Taissa her in her swanky New Jersey home. You could say it’s the happiest we’ve seen Taissa be as an adult — except we aren’t dealing with the real Taissa here, but her alter ego who’s commonly referred to as “Other Tai.”
“I was told at the beginning of the season, ‘It’s basically going to be Other Tai the whole time,'” Cypress reveals about the conversations she had with the show’s writers, directors, and producers heading into the third installment. “So pretty much, if you’re watching Season 3, it’s Other Tai the whole time.”
Knowing Other Tai would have an increased presence in Season 3, Cypress had questions about her character’s alter ego for some of the creative forces behind the series, including creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, and their co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco. Chief among them was whether Other Tai and the real Taissa had a shared recollection of events. The answer was yes, which, for Cypress, meant she had to flesh out Other Tai. “I was like, ‘Oh, OK, so they share all the same memories, they know about each [other] — so they’re the same person,'” she explains. “That was my thing that I came up with.”
The actress admits she only had to make “little, tiny” tweaks to her performance after learning this new information as it didn’t significantly alter her characterization of Taissa. “I always thought that Taissa was a narcissist. Everything she says comes from an ‘I’ perspective. You can go back to Season 1 — everything she says, even when she is trying to get rid of her wife in Season 1, she’s like, ‘I don’t know what I’m gonna do.’… So I knew that about her, and so I took that even further,” Cypress shares. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is narcissism to the nth degree where she has completely created this other thing that she can blame that’s not her.'”
Other Tai’s takeover of Taissa in Season 3 also didn’t change how Cypress approached her character’s love story with Van as she believes their romance is driven in large part by Other Tai. “If that was Tai, I don’t think any of that stuff would have happened. Other Tai is so obsessed with Van that she needed her. She needed her to live; she needed this. This is what she wanted. [She] threw away her whole life to get this, so that she could just be free and have fun,” the actress argues. “If our Tai was a part of any of that, that situation would have gone so differently — with her, with Simone, the whole thing.”
Even if it had come about with the real Taissa in the driver’s seat, though, Taissa and Van’s love story “certainly would have been a lot more boring,” Cypress opines. “Because our Tai — she’s got a candy-coated shell. Her life is perfect. Her life is storybook. And that’s the way she wanted it. And so, that’s what she’s gonna go for.”
Photo credit: Colin Bentley/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME
In a shocking turn of events, Van is fatally stabbed by fellow plane crash survivor Melissa (Hilary Swank) in the ninth episode of the season, “How the Story Ends,” putting a tragic end to her and (Other) Taissa’s decades-spanning love affair — one that devastated Cypress and Ambrose as much as it did fans of the show. While neither actress was told the specifics of their characters’ joint Season 3 arc, both were informed early on that Van wouldn’t survive the season.
“[It] broke our hearts,” Cypress divulges. “We didn’t know what the story was gonna be, but we knew we were going to be working together a lot, and we were like, ‘Let’s just f–king fall in love. Let’s just fall in love; let’s just do it!’ And so we basically did. We hung out a lot, and [Ambrose is] such a giving actor; it’s easy to fall into whatever she’s giving me in a scene.”
Van’s death comes on the heels of Taissa finally retaking control of herself after winning an internal battle against her alter ego. This means it’s the real Taissa who finds Van dead on Melissa’s living room floor. “It’s the realest Taissa you’re going to see — a different version of Tai that you’ve seen [so far]. … This is the beginning of her actual story, in my opinion,” Cypress says about that moment, adding that shooting it didn’t require a ton of effort on her part. “I mean, it was heart-wrenching and f–king sucked, but walking into that room and seeing Lauren lying on the ground — it was terrible, and it was very easy to be emotional about it.”
Cypress felt similarly shooting Van’s burial scene in the finale, “Full Circle,” in which Taissa cuts out and takes a bite out of her deceased lover’s heart before laying her to rest. She describes it as one of her favorite scenes “I’ve ever taped,” even if a large chunk of it was left on the cutting-room floor. “Ameni [Rozsa, the writer of the episode] had written a gorgeous eulogy and dedication to love for Van. And I was so proud to have gotten this speech — and it got cut out of the show, which is heartbreaking for me, because it was like my baby,” the actress admits, stressing, however, that she doesn’t hold any grudges for the decision to trim her character’s monologue. “The moment still works. … It looked lovely.”
The part of Taissa’s eulogy that made it into the episode features her proclaiming that she’s “done forgetting.” “Starting now, I’m going to remember all of it. All of you. And all of me,” she tells her dead lover. Those words gain meaning in a conversation she has with Misty (Christina Ricci) later in the episode in which she blames their former teammate Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) for all the terrible things that have happened to and around them, including Van’s and Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) untimely deaths and the hardship they and their fellow Yellowjackets endured as teenagers while stranded in the Canadian wilderness for 19 months. “The worst of what we went through? She fueled it. She thrived on it,” Taissa asserts. “I forgot that for the longest time, but I can’t anymore.”
When asked why Taissa would forget details from such a defining period of her life, Cypress suggests she might’ve developed Stockholm syndrome after returning to civilization. “You’re so elated to be home, you forget. You forget all the terrible things that happened. You put it aside. You’re not going to talk about it ever again. So obviously, those things go away,” Cypress explains. “I’m surprised that it took that long for somebody to remember, because that teen Shauna [played by Sophie Nélisse], she is a piece of [work]. … It surprised me that it took that long for somebody to be like, ‘Shauna was f–king nuts, and she’s the cause of all this.’ And it’s going to be interesting moving forward to see how that plays out.”
Photo credit: Darko Sikman/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME
Hellbent on preventing Shauna from becoming the “last one standing,” Taissa teams up with Misty to take down the former Antler Queen. “She wants vengeance,” Cypress says of her character. “I think she’s a f–king killer; she[‘s] going to f–king kill. I think we’re gonna see a very angry and vengeful Taissa. And I’m excited.”
All three seasons of Yellowjackets are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime plan.
