Ashley Sutton on how her ‘Yellowjackets’ character represents ‘humanity’ but is also ‘finding the darkness within herself’
Ashley Sutton may not have joined the cast of Yellowjackets until the show’s third season, but her relationship with the Showtime drama began long before that. Looking to expand her résumé, Sutton auditioned for a small part in the original pilot from show creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson five years ago. While the actress didn’t book the job, she became an instant fan of the genre-bending series.
“When I got that first audition, just reading it and seeing how it’s dark and spooky, but also really funny, made me really interested in the show, because I love how it kind of has two genres. It does a little bit of everything,” Sutton tells Gold Derby (watch the video interview above). “And so I was like, ‘OK, well, if I book this or not, I’m going to be watching the show.’ And … when it came out, I would watch it just with my friends. We would get together and talk about all of our theories of what we thought was going to happen in the episode.”
Jump ahead a few years, and Sutton had another shot at auditioning for a role on the survival saga — and this time, she landed the part. The actress joined Season 3 as Hannah, a frog scientist researching the mating habits of a rare frog species in the wilds of Canada. She makes her first appearance at the end of the sixth episode, “Thanksgiving (Canada),” when Hannah, her research and romantic partner, Edwin (Nelson Franklin), and their guide, Kodiak (Joel McHale), stumble upon the titular soccer team’s camp while its remaining members are feasting on the body of their assistant coach, Ben (Steven Krueger).
Matters turn deadly rather quickly for the three interlopers as Lottie (Courtney Eaton), one of the players who survived the plane crash that left her and her teammates stranded in the Canadian wilderness, buries an ax in Edwin’s head just moments upon their arrival. Hannah and Kodiak are able to make a run for it, but both are eventually caught and brought back to the camp, where they’re subsequently held hostage by the Yellowjackets as the latter decide what to do with them.
“The big thing that Ashley Lyle, one of our showrunners and the [co-]creator of the show, said to me was, ‘Hannah is humanity. She is the character that is going to show just the difference of how much the Yellowjackets have lost humanity at this point,'” Sutton reveals about the introduction of her character in the ’90s timeline. “While some of them are still holding on — like [Sophie Thatcher‘s] Natalie is holding on as much as possible — they still had to do some things that have dehumanized them in so many different ways.”
That difference is only buttressed by the fact that Hannah has something in common with the plane crash survivors: As a teenage mom, she, too, had a troubled adolescence that forced her to grow up early. “The Yellowjackets themselves have also had to grow up a little bit in the last year that they’ve been stuck out there,” Sutton notes. “They’re having to learn to survive, to find food, to build the shelter — this camp — and figure out how to coexist in almost a community. So they are kind of growing up, and [Hannah] is kind of meeting them in the middle.”
Because Hannah encounters them at that stage of their development, Sutton leaned on what she envisioned was her character’s high-school experience to connect with her new co-stars inside her scenes. “I really just imagined [that] Hannah’s high-school experience was very difficult because she had a child — so I imagine it wasn’t as normal of a high-school experience as some kids have,” the actress explains. “This was kind of like her redo, in some sense, where she’s kind of getting to do it again, and she’s smarter and she’s more intelligent than them. And she studied survival, so she actually knows how to play the game.”
Indeed, Hannah knows exactly what she needs to do to keep herself and her allies alive in the wilderness at any given moment. In the ninth episode, “How the Story Ends,” that entails bowing to rising “Antler Queen” Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) after the latter catches Hannah and Kodiak cutting themselves loose in the middle of the night as part of a larger escape plan devised by Natalie and a handful of other Yellowjackets. To win over Shauna’s trust and hopefully keep herself and her coconspirators out of harm’s way, Hannah claims Kodiak gave her the knife she used to cut herself loose and fatally stabs him with it. “I want to be part of this,” she then tells Shauna while compliantly handing her the knife.
“I think [Hannah] knows she has to side with Shauna in order to get the upper hand, until she can figure out a way to flip everything back,” Sutton says about her character’s split-second decision. “She really doesn’t have a choice.”
But there are additional layers to that moment, the actress highlights. After Hannah throws Kodiak under the bus, he angrily calls her a “c–t” — which doesn’t go over well with Hannah. “[He] calls her a really nasty word that she doesn’t like, and she acts in the moment and does the thing. I think she feels a bit of power from it,” Sutton argues. “I think she feels that she could take someone’s life, which is not something she ever thought she could experience.”
“I think she’s slowly finding the darkness within herself because she’s seeing it all around her, seeing how complex all of the Yellowjackets are, how some of them are living in their darkness or light, or at least exploring it. Lottie covering herself in blood after she [kills] Edwin — like those moments are really connecting Hannah to that darker thing that’s inside of her,” Sutton adds. “And I think [in] that moment with Kodi, she’s really like, ‘Oh, I can do that too, like I have that ability.’ And I think it is intriguing, because I think it’s the first time she’s been able to explore something like that.”
Even as she explores the potential darkness inside her, though, the primary goal for Hannah at all times is still to survive and find a way back home to her now 10-year-old daughter, Alex. During the climactic hunt in the season finale, “Full Circle,” she ensures Natalie she’s still on her side, swapping outfits with her so Natalie can call for rescue without Shauna noticing she’s MIA.
“I do think in that moment, for me, I was really feeling like Hannah would sacrifice her own life just to get everybody else home,” Sutton says. “Because I think she’s realized how everybody else is feeling, is struggling, and how hard all of this has been on them — and she’s only been here for a little while.”
As of this writing, Yellowjackets has yet to be picked up for a fourth season by Showtime, but Sutton already has hopes for her character’s storyline in a potential follow-up installment. “I don’t think we’ve even seen her begin to process everything, because it’s all happening so quickly, and all of the loss she [has endured] — like this whole journey into the wilderness, her life back at home, her child, her boyfriend, and then the guide that is gonna get them home — there’s just so much happening so quickly. So she’s really just trying to survive to the next day in every moment,” the actress underlines. “I really hope we get to see some exploration of her feeling the feelings or finally understanding the weight of everything that’s happening.”
