In acting & her music side-project, Yellowjackets star Sophie Thatcher always aims to be vulnerable

This story originally appeared in the summer 2023 issue of Alternative Press. Read the cover story here.

A few years ago, Sophie Thatcher was living in an infamous apartment complex in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A converted industrial building featuring a myriad of lofted bedrooms and communal living spaces, it’s a residence known for wild parties and housing a cohort of DJs and skaters with a tendency to ghost whoever they’re dating. 

Thatcher’s well aware that it’s a bit of a cliche that she used to live there before moving to the East Village and more recently LA, which is where she’s now based. Thankfully, it wasn’t long until she no longer had to deal with neighbors who weren’t taking the early days of the pandemic seriously. By late 2020, she found out Showtime gave a series order to the pilot she shot back in 2019 and shortly after was filming the rest of the season in Vancouver. Now among the stars of what became Yellowjackets — one of the most popular, acclaimed prestige dramas on TV, with more than a few of its own subreddits — she seems to be a far cry from those humble Brooklyn beginnings. 

It’s safe to say that Yellowjackets — which just aired its second season and follows the trauma of a girls’ varsity soccer team after they survive a flight crash in the wilderness — has become a pop culture phenomenon. While there’s bone-chilling body horror, shocking cannibalism and mysteries to untangle, the series’ appeal is that the real terror at its helm is having to navigate the world as a 16-year-old girl or a middle-aged woman. For many viewers, there’s a validation in seeing the experience of girlhood depicted as relentless as it can be. 

Read more: The 11 best alt-rock Yellowjackets needle drops

[Photo by Robert Ascroft/Showtime]

That’s the kind of art Thatcher has always been drawn to. As a music fan and student of cinema, she’s long retreated into works with darker themes to help make sense of her own reality. “BoJack Horseman is [my] comfort show. I grew up with Elliott Smith. When people ask me if his music depresses me, I’m like, ‘No, it centers me. It makes me feel like what I’m feeling isn’t the end of the world and that I’m not fucking alone in feeling that,” Thatcher says. “That’s all I want to do as an artist. Whatever I was feeling with his music really early on, I want to do that for other people with acting and art and music.” 

She’s doing that already, from playing headstrong, troubled Natalie on Yellowjackets and her upcoming role in the Stephen King adaptation The Boogeyman to the music she’s quietly been working on. So while she may not have exactly set out to be the next scream queen, you can count on her and her artistic endeavors to help usher you through the darkness. 

“It’s a release people can find solace within,” Thatcher says of Yellowjackets. “There’s so many scales of emotions — there’s rage, there’s loneliness, there’s pretty much everything that people can connect to at any point in their life. And that’s why I think it has such a specific audience.”

While her character Natalie, or “Nat” (who’s played by Juliette Lewis in the present timeline), faces neglect, isolation, addiction and questions surrounding faith in season 2, she speaks to anybody who sought escapism to cope in their youth. More than an angsty teenager with an affinity for grunge, Thatcher portrays Nat with immense strength, even though she struggles to admit to herself that she doesn’t have to be so strong all of the time. 

[Courtesy of Kailey Schwerman/Showtime]

“There’s something scary about doing [a show like Yellowjackets] so early in your career,” Thatcher says. “It’s empowering [working with] these women who have been in their careers for 25 years and to see how this has revived their careers, but there’s also something scary about it because it’s like, ‘How do I not top this? How can I continue to match this?’” 

Now, she’s realized the series and portraying such a complex character has allowed her to set a bar for herself in what projects she takes on going forward. 

Taking on Nat has been a challenging experience for Thatcher, in part because she feels like a heightened version of herself and it can be especially vulnerable to explore that, then have it be perceived. “I have to distance myself from that and realize that part of the job is being vulnerable. When you’re doing the job right, people can sense that you’re being vulnerable, and that’s what they connect to,” she says. “But then it’s also knowing that Natalie’s in me, but that’s not me. That’s a small part of me.”

This season in particular was intense — but for other reasons, like the cannibalism of it all. Nat, for instance, becomes the target of a hunger-crazed hunting chase at one point, and the banquet hallucination in episode 2 was overwhelmingly realistic to shoot. Some castmates vomited, and Thatcher felt close to experiencing a panic attack. Ultimately, though, she says they were great at “turning it off” and kept things light on set by joking about whether they would eat each other. By the end of the season, she even experienced her favorite Nat moment to date.

The scene is in the season finale. “With the exhaustion of wanting a little downtime and second season to be over, I felt this crazy mania on set I had never felt before — and hopefully it translated to the camera,” she says. “It’s this manic, glorious, grandiose scene, which was really fun to shoot. I went to my trailer and I cried after that. It was like, ‘I can breathe.’ I get that way sometimes, but that was one of the last moments I felt that way.”

[Courtesy of Showtime]

That sense of relief is how she’s looking ahead at her career, too. While there are a couple more “very dark” projects she’s attached to that haven’t been announced quite yet, she’s ready to take on lighter projects, too. “I love sulking and living in that world,” she jokes. But even if it’s the “jaded, grittier” parts that she considers “fun,” she recognizes that’s a “headspace you can’t always live in.” 

So she’s been turning to music quite a bit, as both a passion project and to tap into those kinds of feelings that discovering Elliott Smith unlocked in her years ago. She sees it a bit differently from acting, which feels “more innate” to her because she’s been taking on characters or putting on plays since childhood. “Music gets to explore something further into my psyche and something far more personal, where it can be about me and it can be limitless, more abstract, something therapeutic,” she says.

It’s not the first time she’s tackled singing. When she was 18 years old, she made ambient, goth-noise music. Her new project is a stark departure from what she did in her parents’ basement, though. Nowadays, her music tends to sound a bit more mature and melodic.

“I know a lot of people say that they like to write when they’re feeling at their most vulnerable or the most low. Sometimes I want it to be, not exactly a blank slate, but to see where it lets me go,” she says.

[Courtesy of Colin Bentley/Showtime]

It’s there that she finds a crossover between music and acting. “I like to improvise and start really raw. I find this with even going over lines for the first time for a character. I’m very fragile about when I do that, and I have to be in a really good headspace because the first time I ever set up a song or speak my lines, it’s very precious,” she says.

She’s not quite sure when she’ll release what she’s been working on, and feels a bit daunted by how many possibilities there are with music, but creating for the sake of creating has become important to her nevertheless. That even harks back to the best piece of advice she received from her Yellowjackets counterpart Lewis, who told her in an Interview Magazine feature “that it’s really important to finish your thought.” 

“It’s about initiating whatever you had in mind — and that’s it,” she says. “It’s so simple and so, so hard all at once.”

With Thatcher’s tenacity and immense feeling surrounding not just the power of art, but of creating, you get the sense that what she’s been working on will be quite affecting. 

In fact, it’s important to her to be surrounded by a creative community. For instance, she’s been working on music with her boyfriend, producer/Slow Hollows frontman Austin Anderson. “For me, it’s important to not just have actor friends. I like learning from my music friends that actually pursue it and do it seriously,” she says. 

And while she hasn’t quite “figured out” the LA scene yet, she’s remained embedded in the NYC music scene. She’s friends with and feels inspired by musicians like Shallowhalo and Harrison Patrick Smith (aka the Dare), so whenever she’s in the city, she tries her best to spend a night at a gig. “It’s really nice to see people getting the attention they deserve and for doing something so strictly theirs and so specifically theirs. It’s not like they’re following any trend or any scene,” she says. “They’re always going to label it a revival, but they’re doing their own thing.”

Thatcher’s doing her own thing, too. Whether on Yellowjackets as the fierce, misunderstood Natalie or with her to-be-released-someday singer-songwriter projects, feeling and creating a bit of light in the darkness seems to be the driving force.