The following is a filmography of his work. He’s playing, in other words, against type.Wood at the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con InternationalĮlijah Wood is an American actor and film producer. In Sin City, in Maniac, in I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore (alongside Melanie Lynskey), he plays weirdos, psychopaths, slight dudes who are not themselves in danger but embody it. After The Lord of the Rings, Wood’s career was a series of attempts to reinvent, or perhaps just play around with, his well-established image. Perhaps we may think that this is a character of relative innocence about to be brutally awakened by the cruel world in which he’s found himself maybe he’s an unlikely hero. ![]() It not only creates narrative suspense but maximizes the meaning we can draw from what we know, what we expect, what we remember of Elijah Wood. Slow-playing the introduction of his character is a brilliant move. Who is this guy? What is he doing here? We know very little except what Wood’s face signifies for us. Is it because he was in Flipper? Is it because they co-starred in The Ice Storm? She recognizes him there’s chemistry there, it seems. And so their characters are doubly resurrected, rescued-we don’t know how-from the wilderness and brought back to visibility by Yellowjackets itself. ![]() All of them worked, but none were as well known as they were when the Yellowjackets might have known them. One could charitably say they receded from the spotlight. While, in various ways, Lewis, Ricci, and Wood all owned the ’90s, none experienced midcareer peaks as high as their youthful successes. And Ricci’s Suburban Gothic, her fundamental strangeness, her comfort with the unsettling-what we recall from her childhood colors every moment as well.Ī crucial element of this is not just iconicity but also the sense of these actors having been themselves lost. We understand Lynskey’s suburban repression to be murderous, to be lustful, before it even becomes that, because we know Lynskey already and what she’s fighting to hold back. In every scene, Lewis carries the threat of orgiastic violence. She’s unmistakably, viscerally Christina Ricci, whoever and whatever that means to you.Ī show built in this way works through the management of moods the way a face will irresistibly conjure for you, the viewer, a feeling. Either way, when that actor looks into the camera for the briefest of moments, she’s not future Misty, not yet even a character on the show. Maybe she’s Wednesday Addams to you, maybe she’s the kid from Mermaids, or maybe she calls to mind the metallic sense memory of Buffalo ’66. And then, in the episode’s final moments, we cut to the present, and we see her all grown up. All through the episode, set mostly in the show’s mid-’90s timeline, we’ve followed this mousy, rage-possessed teen girl named Misty as she’s shunted aside, socially brutalized, and stranded with all her bullies after a plane crash. Anyone who’d seen promotional images for Yellowjackets would have known she was a co-star, but the show withholds her from us until her entrance matters most. Lewis and Lynskey (along with Cypress, who didn’t make her screen debut until the aughts) anchor most of the episode, but it saves Christina Ricci until the end. Yellowjackets’ pilot uses this double vision to great effect. Send me updates about Slate special offers. Like the Liz Phair or Radiohead on the soundtrack or the SnackWell’s scavenged from the plane crash, the characters are part of a visible internal joke that sustains the show: These kids would definitely know who these actors are. The pulsing memory of these films with those faces accomplishes a tremendous amount of work for the show. ![]() For Gen X and elder millennial viewers who grew up with them, these actors signify worlds in and of themselves. Lewis, Ricci, and Lynskey’s ’90s canons especially play a substantial, subterranean part in the show’s aesthetic as well as its drama: Natural Born Killers, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Cape Fear, The Addams Family, Mermaids, Heavenly Creatures, But I’m a Cheerleader-the show is basically a dark version of the young Ricci’s similarly time-hopping nostalgia blast Now and Then. A series about trauma and ’90s nostalgia, Yellowjackets works not just because of the quality of performance it gets from its adult leads Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Melanie Lynskey-or the uncanny duets they play with their young counterparts-but because of the iconic baggage they bring with them. Yellowjackets is a funny, violent, and compelling puzzle-box series, but its heart is in its stunt casting.
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