Samantha Hanratty on Misty stepping ‘into her own’ in ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3: ‘She is a lot more useful than I think a lot of people give her credit for’

In Season 3 of Yellowjackets, teen Misty proves she’s capable of much more than you initially thought. “I think we got to see her actually step into her own a little bit,” Samantha Hanratty, who plays the character on the hit Showtime series, tells Gold Derby. “[We get to see] how she is very talented and very smart, and she is a lot more useful than I think a lot of people give her credit for.”

After a plane crash leaves the Wiskayok High School Yellowjackets — a girls’ soccer team from New Jersey — stranded in the remote Canadian wilderness, it’s Misty, their geeky, socially awkward, and largely neglected equipment manager, who proves to be one of their most invaluable members. Having purportedly taken the Red Cross babysitter training course twice, she becomes the go-to medic for the crash survivors, as well as the primary carer for Ben (Steven Krueger), the team’s assistant coach who loses part of his leg in the accident.

In Season 3, Misty takes on yet another responsibility. After Ben is put on trial by the Yellowjackets for allegedly burning down their cabin, Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), the team’s leader, persuades Misty to serve as his lawyer. Despite having no prior experience in the legal field — outside of having likely watched countless court cases on TV, as Hanratty surmises — Misty thrives in her newest role.

“I think there’s a part of her that — even though she was never technically on the team, she is a player herself,” Hanratty says. “And I think she really sees this as, ‘I want to win! I want to win!’ She thinks of herself as the smartest person in the room. And so, I think it’s also a weird exercise, in a way too, of manipulation, of knowing, ‘When I talk to Mari (Alexa Barajas), what’s gonna get Mari to confess this or that? And when I talk to Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), oh, I’m gonna go the angle of hurt and sadness. And when I talk to Lottie (Courtney Eaton), it’s more logical and spiritual.'”

But there is also something much more personal at stake for Misty here. Infatuated with the now-disgraced coach, Misty cares deeply about Ben and has made it her life’s mission to keep him alive out in the woods. “I think that she has saved Ben’s life now twice at this point, and this is her third time and third attempt to do so,” Hanratty notes. “And I think that she takes it very seriously.”

“She’s wanting so bad for him to give — what he ends up doing — but, like, a true performance of sorrow. And when he’s not doing that, you can really see her cracks of frustration, of being like, ‘Then, what the f–k are you doing, Ben? Like, why are we here?'” Hanratty adds. “It’s fun for me to play her because she does try every angle of what she can do and what she can accomplish, but I do think there was a majority part of her just wanting to save his life — and also appease Natalie, because she saw that Natalie was also on their team.”

Photo credit: Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+ with Showtime

Despite Misty’s efforts, though, Ben is found guilty after an increasingly authoritarian Shauna sways the vote against him. While he’s provisionally saved from execution after Akilah (Nia Sondaya) has a vision that he is their “bridge” home, his condition only worsens from there on out. After being tied up in an animal pen, having his Achilles tendon sliced, and being force-fed by the Yellowjackets, who would go to any lengths to keep him alive at that point, Ben begs Natalie to end his life. Initially unwilling to, a guilt-ridden Natalie eventually honors the coach’s wishes, sneaking into his camp one night and plunging a knife through his heart. It’s an act of mercy that isn’t received well by the other plane crash survivors — and one by which Hanratty was initially taken aback.

“There was a part of me that was like, ‘It was always supposed to be Misty! If somebody was gonna take his life, it was gonna be Misty,'” the actress admits. “And then reading it, I was like, ‘Oh, God, OK, this is quite beautiful and tragic and kind in a way for it to be her and for it to be at the hands of somebody who truly cared for him.’ And I think Misty has always tried to love and care for him, but in her own way, that’s obsessive and scary.”

In Ben’s final weeks, Misty no longer regards him as a human, but as “her patient,” Hanratty argues. “He was her property that she needed to keep safe. And then all of a sudden, somebody just stripped her from that. And it was like — she doesn’t do well with change, and she doesn’t do well with things being pulled under the rug from her.”

After Natalie walks out of Ben’s camp with the bloody murder weapon still in hand, a perturbed Misty rushes into it to bid farewell to her former crush. Processing the loss, she sits up Ben’s corpse, crosses his arms on his chest, and gently caresses his hair. As the realization of his death subsequently hits her, she begins sobbing, but she doesn’t allow herself to dwell in her grief for long. She promptly hits herself in the head and instructs herself to “stop it.”

“I found a pattern with Misty where she doesn’t allow herself to really get too emotional. She does a lot of self-talk that’s very negative and very like, ‘You’re so stupid, you do this all the time!'” Hanratty shares. “And so I wanted to kind of keep that same thing, where it was like, all of a sudden, emotions are getting too heightened, and I need to … self-regulate and be like, ‘Stop it!’ But also, ‘If you don’t, it could be a life or death situation. If you go out there and you’re this hysterical, then they’re not going to take you seriously. You’re then going to be looked at as a target in some way.'”

Before Misty finally departs Ben’s camp, she kisses him on the lips — a move that Hanratty knows is “quite controversial” but for her was a “sweet” moment that also carries a lot of narrative significance, especially as it marks Misty’s first kiss. “It was a way of saying goodbye to somebody that she truly loved,” she says, “and also doing what she thought other people do. Like, when you say goodbye to somebody, that’s what you do!”

Photo credit: Darko Sikman/Paramount+ with Showtime

Even more controversial than Misty kissing a deceased Ben, though, is her decision to prevent the Yellowjackets from being rescued early on by destroying their plane’s black box in the second episode of Season 1 — and it’s one that comes back to haunt her in Season 3. In the ninth episode, “How the Story Ends,” Natalie catches Misty with the transponder from said box as she’s trying to reclaim a cord from it. The only person besides Misty’s now-perished friend Crystal/Kristen (Nuha Jes Izman) who’s learned about Misty’s fateful decision, Natalie, though overcome with rage, chooses not to rat her teammate out to the rest of the group.

Though Misty has tried Natalie’s — like everyone else’s — patience more times than you can probably count, Hanratty maintains that the two character share a special bond. “They are both true outsiders,” the actress says. “Natalie beats to her own drum — and always has — and is not there for the bullsh-t. And even though Misty tries so hard, she’s an outsider, and it doesn’t matter how hard she tries, she’s never going to get it quite right, especially with this group of people. Besides Walter [the foil to Christina Ricci‘s adult Misty who’s played by Elijah Wood], I don’t think anyone really understands her. And so, I think with Natalie and Misty, there’s always been this kind of invisible tie between the two.”

In the Season 3 finale, “Full Circle,” Misty tries to make it up to Natalie by helping her call for rescue. She uses an antenna from the aforementioned transponder to fix a broken satellite phone that has been brought in by a pair of frog scientists (Ashley Sutton and Nelson Franklin) and their wilderness guide (Joel McHale), and Van (Liv Hewson) has been trying to repair, but to no avail. While Shauna and the other Yellowjackets are distracted with a ritualistic hunt, Natalie climbs to the top of a mountain so she can use the fixed phone to call for help.

After newly crowned Antler Queen Shauna picks up on Natalie’s absence the morning after the hunt and the ensuing feast of its victim, Mari (aka “Pit Girl”), the camera cuts to Misty, who takes off her mask, puts on her glasses, and slowly breaks into a smile. Viewers will recognize the moment from the flash-forwards in the show’s pilot — except it looks and feels quite different this time around.

“Bart [Nickerson, the co-creator of the show and director of the finale] kept having to remind me it’s not the same as the pilot,” Hanratty admits. “This is the retelling. This is a different version of it. And I appreciate that so much, because it did give me some relief of, like, ‘Oh, OK, it doesn’t need to be completely exact.'”

Indeed, in the pilot, Misty appears to be in a state of ecstasy after hunting, killing, and devouring one of her teammates. But in the Season 3 finale, her smirk represents her satisfaction over knowing not only that a rescue plan is successfully underway, but most importantly, that she is in on it.

“That smirk meant so much to me, because I never knew what it was about. I always thought, in the back of my head, ‘I know something that you don’t know!'” Hanratty, who was the only original cast member present during the filming of the pilot scenes, reveals. “And now getting to be a part of it and be like, ‘I know something you don’t know, Shauna — and we pulled it off.’ And getting to be the sidekick to the hero in that moment was, for me, very exciting as somebody that has played the, quote, unquote, ‘hated, crazy character.'”