Heres A Melanie Lynskey Appreciation Post

In her first-ever movie, Heavenly Creatures, she played Pauline Parker, a New Zealand teen who killed her mother with the help of her friend Juliet Hulme in the 1950s.

Since then, she’s done everything from drama (Ever After) to comedy (But I’m a Cheerleader) to horror (Castle Rock). Most recently she’s been killing it (no pun intended) in Yellowjackets, and will next star as Betty Gore, the victim of real-life killer Candy Montgomery, in a TV miniseries about their friendship.

Her CV tracks, considering the types of characters she’s drawn to. She told PageSix back in 2011, “Even when I’m reading a script where I’m supposed to be looking at the lead role, I’ll find myself gravitating toward some small weirdo in a few scenes instead.”

“A lot of women out there look like me,” she said in a New York Times article about Yellowjackets. “That was really important to me.”

After a member of the Yellowjackets production team implied that she should lose weight for the show, she swiftly shut them down. She told Rolling Stone, “It was really important to me for [Shauna] to not ever comment on my body, to not have me putting a dress on and being like, ‘I wish I looked a bit better.'”

She added, “I did find it important that this character is just comfortable and sexual and not thinking or talking about it, because I want women to be able to watch it and be like, ‘Wow, she looks like me and nobody’s saying she’s the fat one,.’ That representation is important.”

She told The New York Times that there were times she had to tell the Yellowjackets writers that there were things she felt Shauna simply would not do.

“When I was about to go on a date with Adam,” she explained, “they had me stealing a pair of my daughter’s underwear — like a thong — to wear. And I just was like, ‘Guys, first of all, as a mother, no.’ That’s so gross. I know that Shauna doesn’t have boundaries, but that’s, like, a step too far.”

She went on to point out that the underwear wouldn’t even believably fit her. “There’s no woman in the world that’s going to watch that scene and be like, ‘I believe that she’s comfortably wearing those underpants,'” she said.