Season one of Yellowjackets just ended, and we’re already thinking about season two. Yes, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Yes, we’re still reeling from the finale. Normally, we’d say the body isn’t even cold yet, but … let’s just say the body hasn’t been brought up to room temperature.
Many fans were expecting the finale to reveal another present-day survivor we hadn’t met this season, preferably via more excellent stunt casting. Instead, the Yellowjackets writers trolled that very notion by only giving us Adult Allie, who, she’ll have you know, identifies as a survivor. We also got a glimpse of people we’re meant to believe are members of Lottie’s cult, suggesting the possibility of an adult Lottie kicking around in the 21st century. So long as there are Yellowjackets who aren’t 100 percent confirmed dead, and so long as there are beloved actresses of the 1990s to play them, we choose to believe they’re merely waiting in the wings for future seasons. Here’s who we want playing who.
Adult Van: Lauren Ambrose
We’re gunning for Van to make it out of those woods alive. We haven’t seen Liv Hewson’s character in the present day yet, but she’s already proven herself to be the biggest survivor of the group: She survived being trapped in the plane seconds before it combusted, she survived a wolf eating her face and then she survived her teammates making the near-fatal oopsie of burning her alive. Van is armored. And in the proud tradition of Yellowjackets casting ’90s starlets as the grown-up versions of its ’90s teens, we think Lauren Ambrose is the one who will have to play our favorite ginger warrior when the character inevitably emerges in the year 2022. Ambrose broke out as a high-schooler who shared Van’s deadpan sense of humor in the 1998 teen sex comedy Can’t Hardly Wait and did teen horror pulp in the indie Psycho Beach Party, but most importantly, she was Claire Fisher, edgy and creative teen daughter on Six Feet Under. We know people have also suggested Sarah Snook, but Ambrose fits the age, timeline, and casting M.O. better. Watch an early season of Six Feet Under and tell us we’re wrong. Plus Van’s whole dream is to go to New York and enjoy a soft pretzel with Tai. After Six Feet Under, Ambrose focused her career on New York theater and is now a Broadway star. It just makes sense.
Adult Lottie: Shannyn Sossamon
Yellowjackets’ showrunners have confirmed that we’ll be seeing adult Lottie (Courtney Eaton) in season two, and after that finale, we suspect she might be the season’s present-timeline Big Bad. So who do we want to see running a cult and kidnapping Natalie? Vulture floated names like Jordana Brewster and Fairuza Balk to Eaton, to which she said, “… Yeah, I’m not sure.†So we’ve got a better option: Shannyn Sossamon. In the early 2000s, Sossamon was the master of playing smart indie girls who seemed like they weren’t revealing even five percent of what was going on in their heads. Her characters in movies like 40 Days and 40 Nights, The Rules of Attraction, and Wristcutters: A Love Story are women whom dudes would easily follow into some sort of cult. And like Melanie Lynskey, Sossamon has also voiced a creepy, mysterious girl lost in the woods on Over the Garden Wall. Spoiler alert: That character lived in a cabin and was possessed. It’s giving Lottie.
Adult Javi: Wilmer Valderrama
We refuse to believe the Adam-is-actually-Javi theory because that would mean that Shauna killed Javi. And that would suck! During “Doomcoming,†Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) was the one who told young Javi (Luciano Leroux) to run and hide before she tried to carve his big brother up like she was working the prime-rib station at a Vegas buffet. That’s the last we’ve seen of him in the 1996 timeline. Did the baby of the group survive on his own in the outdoors? Did he find a hiding place in the cabin? Has he been taken in by a family of wolves as one of their own? Or did he D-word? And if he didn’t, did he grow up to be Adam (Peter Gadiot), Shauna’s lover with a mysterious back tattoo and a book about the Yellowjackets tragedy hidden in a drawer? If Javi survived the woods and wasn’t Adam, we think a perfect bit of stunt casting would be ’90s heartthrob Wilmer Valderrama, who played horny teen Fez on That ’70s Show. Like Yellowjackets, That ’70s Show was also distinguished by nostalgia for the adolescent aesthetics of an era 20–25 years prior. In a show that already takes a meta approach to its casting, this would be double-meta.
Adult/Ghost/Twist(?) Jackie: Sarah Michelle Gellar
Okay, fine. Jackie (Ella Purnell) is dead. The showrunners have confirmed it. We have to accept it …
… Unless …
We’re just saying, maybe Yellowjackets will jump the shark/wolf/bear in a couple years. Maybe the show’s supernatural elements will go from latent to blatant, and by some act of necromancy, Jackie will be restored. Or maybe, as a grief exercise, present-day Shauna will imagine an adult version of Jackie, the way she already comes to her as visions of her younger self. And if that’s the case, we’re gunning for SMG. Sarah Michelle Gellar was the undisputed queen of charming, popular, but often whiny types like Jackie. She is the queen bee of queen bees. Her Buffy powers would’ve helped her survive in the wilderness and overthrow whatever dark magic Lottie’s dabbling in, and her Daphne powers would help Misty go full citizen detective in the present day. Others on Reddit have expressed their desire for adult Jackie to be played by Robin Tunney or Rebecca Gayheart, but we say think bigger. Think Slayer big. (Not that any of this is happening, but we say lean into the delusion.)
Shauna’s Baby: Isabelle Fuhrman
The odds of Shauna’s baby surviving to adulthood are damn near impossible. Young Shauna has been through so much trauma over the course of her pregnancy, and we’re not sure the occasional bite of deer-jerky rations is a viable substitute for your bog-standard neonatal vitamins. But as of the season finale, she’s still pregnant, even after a plane crash, months in the woods, and getting poisoned with Misty’s shrooms. This is some kind of super-fetus. And between Ben’s amputation and Van’s plastic surgery, the girls of Team Yellowjackets are apparently gifted young surgeons. Delivering a woods-baby would be a cinch. If Shauna gives birth … and if it’s born alive … and if they don’t eat it … there’s a not-0 percent chance that child shows up in the present day. Shauna’s baby will have been born in 1997. If it goes through all that and still survives, it’s probably some kind of demonic entity, giving the show a chance to play off another trope of feminist horror. With those two requirements in mind, the best actor for the role is Isabelle Fuhrman of Orphan fame. We know she can do scary evil daughter. We know she can do Hunger Games woods survival. She’s got enough of a family resemblance to Shauna. Casting Fuhrman in this extremely hypothetical scenario would be big-brain.
Adult Akilah: Sonequa Martin-Green
No way iconic besties Mari (Alexa Barajas) and Akilah (Keeya King) are both making it out of this thing alive. They’ve been laying low in the background all season. Someone’s gotta get killed off, and we already know that six people in the crash survive to the present. We hope Mari isn’t pit girl, but we also think that if one of them makes it out alive, it’ll be Akilah, whose character is like 3 percent more developed at this point. Star Trek: Discovery actress Sonequa Martin-Green is a couple years too young for the role, but we’ve seen her survival skills as Sasha Williams on The Walking Dead. Watch her take down Lottie’s cult.
Present-Day Coach Ben: Same Guy, Aged Up
We toyed around with names like Matthew Perry, Craig Bierko, Mark Consuelos, and John Stamos, but ultimately, if Coach Ben makes it (which, like, he won’t) then Steven Krueger has earned the right to dye his hair grey and act the hell out of a shocking twist cameo in a future season. Now we just need to figure out who plays Paul.