‘I do think that I burned down the cabin’: How ‘Yellowjackets’ star Steven Krueger pulled off Coach Ben’s mental and physical decline

Did Coach Ben really burn down the cabin?

That’s a question Yellowjackets viewers have been asking themselves since the show’s Season 2 finale, in which the wilderness home of the titular girls’ soccer team goes up in flames moments after Ben, their assistant coach, contemplates a set of matches sitting outside the shelter.

Steven Krueger, who plays Ben, the only adult survivor of a plane crash that leaves him and several members of the Wiskayok High School Yellowjackets soccer team stranded in the remote Canadian wilderness, knew he wouldn’t get a definitive answer to that question in Season 3. “I knew that [the writers] intentionally wanted to keep it vague and ambiguous,” he tells Gold Derby, “just because that’s a good part of storytelling, I think, especially with the dynamics of the girls.” So, with the help of his acting coach Gregory Berger, the actor came up with his own answer at the beginning of the season.

“To me, the most interesting choice, and the most interesting kind of way to create the character and the art for this particular season, was: ‘Yeah, I actually do think that I burned down the cabin, but I don’t think that I did it with the intention of actually murdering [the girls],'” says Krueger. “I think that part of what I saw at the end of last season was this group of girls who, at one time, were this really cohesive team that worked together, that all liked each other. And they had their problems, of course, but they’ve been figuring out a way to survive. And what I saw was that was starting to decline, right? That situation was starting to become very, very fraught. And so, in my mind, I was actually doing them a favor, to try to kind of bring them all back together, unite around this one common tragedy. … If they no longer had a place to live, then they would have to come together as a unit again and learn how to be a team. And I think that that ultimately would serve them in their survival in the end.”

When Season 3 of the hit Showtime series picks up, in the early days of summer, several months after the cabin fire, a lot of this has come true. Led by a benevolent Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), the Yellowjackets have built a new outdoor living space, have raised animals for food, and are partaking in fun group activities, including run-and-chase games in the woods and storytelling sessions led by Van (Liv Hewson). At least on the surface, most of the soccer players are thriving. The same cannot be said for their assistant coach.

“He is truly struggling,” Krueger says of Ben. “I mean, here’s a man who’s been on his own now, for six months, trying to scrounge up whatever food he can, while also trying to stay very clandestine, stay hidden, stay away from these girls, just hoping that some sort of rescue ends up coming.”

Photo: Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

Ever since the cabin burned to the ground, Ben has been living in the cave he discovered at the end of Season 2 and a now-deceased Javi (Luciano Leroux) used as shelter during the first half of the winter. Even though Ben had long distanced himself from the Yellowjackets by the time their wilderness home perished, cloistering himself in his room as his physical and mental health deteriorated, this marks the first time he’s been completely on his own in the woods.

For Krueger, it was important to explore the psychological toll of being in “complete and utter isolation while also having to be so aware of your surroundings.” “He couldn’t relax,” he maintains about Ben. “There was never a time when he could just kind of lounge around. Not only did he have to find his own food and, of course, survive, he also had to worry about [the girls]. Were they out looking for him? Were they hunting him? Did they just forget about him and they’re gonna let him live peacefully? All of that, I think, is going through his mind on a, really, daily basis. And so, yeah, that’s why you see early in those episodes, he’s lost it a little bit.”

However, Ben’s concerns are ultimately proven valid, as he’s eventually caught and subsequently put on trial by the Yellowjackets for burning down their cabin. Although a dedicated Misty (Samantha Hanratty) agrees to serve as his lawyer, Ben doesn’t initially see the point in holding a trial. “You know that this whole trial is just a farce,” he tells Misty, who’s taken care of the soccer coach ever since he lost part of his right leg in the plane crash. “I’ve already lost.” But after taking the stand, Ben makes a heartfelt case for his innocence — one that probably had you, too, wondering, “Does Ben actually want to live?”

For Krueger, who describes his character’s testimony as an “inflection point” in his Season 3 storyline, the question at the heart of Ben’s court speech couldn’t just be whether he wanted to live or die. “Something that I played with throughout the back half of my storyline this season was: What am I really trying to do with these girls?” the actor reveals. “Like, do I need to say anything to them? No, I could just keep my mouth shut and let them do whatever they want. So the whole point is, like — what am I trying to get out of them? How am I trying to affect them?”

The idea Krueger came up with is that Ben wants the Yellowjackets “to have to make the hardest decision of their lives.” “Whatever they end up doing with me — whether they kill me, whether they keep me alive, whether they keep me shackled in this animal pen — I want it to be the hardest decision they ever have to make,” he explains. “And the reason for that is because that’s going to expose who they truly are, right? It’s going to bring out their true characters.”

As to why Ben would be so invested in exposing the Yellowjackets’ true selves, Krueger points to the closeted coach’s failure to live in his own truth. “He chose to live behind a mask for so much of his life, and he doesn’t want that for anybody else,” he says. “That is one of the biggest failures of his life, one of the biggest regrets that he has. And he’s still in this mode where he thinks he can teach these girls something. He thinks he can leave them with something.”

Photo: Colin Bentley/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

Despite Ben’s passionate testimony and a convincing defense from Misty, Ben winds up losing the trial after an increasingly dictatorial Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) persuades several of her teammates to find him guilty. Though he’s saved from execution after Akilah (Nia Sondaya) has a vision that he’s their “bridge” to civilization, matters just become gradually worse for him from there on. Exerting all efforts to keep him alive, the Yellowjackets tie Ben up in an animal pen and slice his Achilles tendon so that he can’t escape, and force-feed him after he goes on a hunger strike. By the time fall arrives, there’s little left of the soccer coach, physically as well as mentally, besides his desire to die.

Because Krueger was given a heads-up about Ben’s storyline well before cameras started rolling on Season 3, he was able to prepare for his character’s mental and physical decline in the season. Not only did the advance notice allow him to grow out his beard, but it also gave him the chance to drop some weight.

Citing an interview in which Bradley Cooper spoke about his experience packing on weight to play a Navy SEAL sniper in Clint Eastwood‘s biographical war film American Sniper (2014), Krueger says he took notice of how a change in an actor’s physicality — in Cooper’s case, a drastic weight gain — could affect their mental state and, by extension, their performance.

“For me, I was like, ‘Well, this is the exact opposite. If I’m able to, kind of like, trim down and lose some weight and just feel that, not just physically but also mentally, it would [affect] the performance.’ And it truly did,” Krueger recalls about his experience losing weight for Season 3. “I think, throughout the season, I felt times where I was surrounded by these girls and where there might have been a time earlier in the series where Ben felt like, even on one leg, he maybe could have overpowered these girls. That was certainly no longer the case this season. I did, I felt physically weak and intimidated by these girls, and I think that that kind of bled its way into a lot of the scenes that we ended up doing in the back half of the season.”

Kept alive against his will for several weeks at this point, Ben begs Natalie, his kindred spirit and the last person he trusts in the wilderness, to either end his life or give him a weapon so he can do it himself in the sixth episode of Season 3, entitled “Thanksgiving (Canada).” Initially unwilling to, a remorseful Natalie eventually honors the coach’s wishes, sneaking into his camp one night and plunging a knife through his heart — much to the dismay of her teammates.

When Krueger was informed by the creators of the show, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, that Ben would bite the dust in Season 3, his first question to them was who his killer would be. “[Had] they said anybody besides Natalie, I was going to be very upset,” the actor says. “We have seen her kind of falter a little bit as the leader of this group. And so, this was going to be kind of the final nail in the coffin.”

For Krueger, Natalie’s act of mercy also goes a long way in explaining the state in which viewers find the adult version of the character, played by a now-departed Juliette Lewis, when she’s first introduced in the present-day timeline. “We’ve alluded to it the entire show, but I don’t think anyone actually realized until now just what [Natalie] had gone through out in the wilderness,” the actor highlights. “Now, to me, it makes so much more sense why she was as messed up as she was for all of those years in between. I mean, she literally murdered somebody, even though it was a mercy killing. And because of that, she was kind of dethroned as the leader of the group.”

While filming Ben’s death was both physically and mentally demanding for Krueger, the actor found the overall experience “so easy,” thanks to his collaboration with Thatcher.

“Working with Sophie Thatcher throughout this series has been one of the easiest things for me, because I can do all my work on my own at home, and then as soon as I show up to set, I know that I don’t have to worry about any of it. I know that the two of us are going to be locked in with each other. And that’s exactly how this scene went down,” Krueger recalls. “Obviously, I had pored over this scene and thought about every angle that you could possibly think about it from, you know, ‘What was he thinking? What was going through his mind each step of the way?’ And the second that the cameras were up and we were on set, I forgot all of it. I just completely let all of it go, and Sophie and I just kind of, like, played off of each other and looked into each other’s eyes.”