The Second Season Of Yellowjackets May Be Over, But Star Courtney Eaton Is Just Getting Started

If you watched the most recent season of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s hit drama about a group of elite high-school soccer players stranded in the Canadian wilderness after a plane crash, you likely need no introduction to Lottie Matthews. She’s the Cassandra-esque soothsayer of the group, attempting to spiritually counsel a horde of traumatised young women who don’t know that her “visions” are actually symptoms of the mental illness she’s been grappling with since long before the plane went down. This makes sense, as Courtney Eaton, the 27-year-old Australian actress who plays the teenage Lottie, imbues her with a spooky kind of calm that can convince even the viewer, who knows better, that she can really see the future. Recently, Vogue spoke with Eaton about seeing Lottie through an emotionally draining season, how she unwinds when she’s not playing a teenage cannibal on TV, and what’s next for her after the Hollywood writers’ strike concludes.

How has life been for you since the finale aired?

Well, it’s kind of a relief that it’s out there, in a way. It’s been good! I’ve had people coming up to me, like, the other day I was at Whole Foods and I had someone come up behind me and whisper, “I’m glad you’re not dead, I really love the show.” [Laughs.]

What was it like transitioning your character of Lottie from season one to season two?

Season two was so interesting, because I had previously gotten to explore Lottie by myself, and this season I shared the portrayal of her with Simone Kessell [Kessell plays Lottie as an adult], who’s amazing and who I love so much. This season, we find Lottie in a sort of leadership position, which was a cool direction to try to take her in and kind of figure out how that would be sitting with her.

It’s such a shocking season for Lottie; how did you feel when you first saw how her journey would unfold?

We’re kept in the dark a lot throughout the season and we kind of find out what’s happening when we get the script. I mean, a lot of us will do detective work and go to hair and make-up or to the writers and be like, “What can you tell me?” So it was kind of a fun surprise to see what happened in the finale. I had kind of guessed that the cabin was going to burn down, but seeing what happened with Juliette [Lewis]’s character was kind of heartbreaking, because she’s part of the family. Hopefully she comes back and haunts us, because she’s just the best, and the themes and emotion she brought to the show are just kind of unmatched. We have so many deaths on the show that you don’t necessarily trust who’s going to be here and who’s not, and we have little parties to celebrate when our characters die. [Laughs.]

Are you a horror fan in your offscreen life?

Not really. I’m scared of them! Horror films are really big in American culture, but I grew up in Australia not watching a ton of films, because I’m from a smaller town and it would just be whatever was playing at the one theatre in town. So I feel like I’m not as much of a film buff as I should be, and I’m just getting into horror now. My friends will come over and be like, “Okay, we have to watch this classic tonight.”

What’s next on the horizon for you, now that season two of Yellowjackets is behind you?

We’ve been pretty nonstop with press and that kind of thing since the finale, so I’ve just been focusing on that. I’m working on some things right now, but obviously the writers’ strike is playing out and we’re trying to support that and give the writers whatever they need and just kind of take it as it comes. There are some exciting things coming up, though!

What do you tend to get up to when you’re not filming?

I love a good hike, which is so LA of me. I got into pottery while we were filming the second season; I’m just kind of relaxing and living life, because usually when we wrap a season we’re kind of shells of people, what with the long hours and the material we shoot. It’s nice to just take a break and catch up with my friends, because I don’t really see them six months out of the year.

Last question: what was the emotional impact of portraying Lottie as her mental health spirals downward?

I think as I’ve gotten older and further into my career, I’ve gotten better at leaving things at work and kind of not getting not too deep into it. I lived with [costar] Sophie Nélisse during this season, so that made it quite easy to just leave work and get in the car and blast music and talk about the day and watch TV when we got home. By the end of the season, we’re just so tired and covered in dirt, no matter how hard we scrub our skin, so you do kind of need a month or two to recuperate. Eating humans will do that to you. [Laughs.]