“I feel a bit stunted”

Sophie Thatcher has said she is ready to leave Yellowjackets behind, admitting that playing teenage Natalie Scatorccio has left her feeling “a bit stunted”.

The 25-year-old actor, also known for Heretic and Companion, earned her breakthrough with the Paramount+ survival thriller series, which is currently shooting its fourth and final season.

Speaking to Variety this week, Thatcher said she had just three days of filming left on the show. “And then I’m free,” she said. “Freeeeeee!!”

Asked whether she had outgrown the show, she made clear that her feelings were not a criticism of its writers.

“I personally feel a bit stunted having to play the same character,” she explained. “And I’m relying on a lot of – I keep saying this, and it’s not necessarily true, maybe it’s just acting – cheat codes.

“Last night, filming until 6am, screaming and crying, the fact that I can get into that so fast without any… It feels less challenging.”

Thatcher continued: “Just playing somebody younger is confusing, and staying in that place you were at when you first filmed the pilot seven years ago is a very confusing thing, and that’s what messed with me the most.

“I want to continue to grow, but then I have to go back to where I was when I was a kid.”

Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Yellowjackets follows the members of a girls’ high-school football team across two timelines: their 19 months stranded in the Canadian wilderness following a plane crash in 1996, and the lives of the survivors decades later. Thatcher plays the teenage Natalie, whose adult counterpart was portrayed by Juliette Lewis.

Lyle and Nickerson announced last October that season four would bring the story to its “twisted conclusion”, saying: “We’ve always known there would come a point when the story would tell us it wants to end, and it’s our belief that our job – our responsibility – is to listen.”

A release date for the final season has not yet been announced.

Thatcher’s comments mark a shift from when she spoke to NME in 2023 and said playing Natalie had “felt very natural” from the beginning. Even then, however, she was consciously looking beyond the character.

“I’m trying to find roles that are so far from Natalie, because I want to prove myself as a chameleon and a character actor,” she said at the time, joking: “Everybody knows me from Yellowjackets… or from having a mullet.”

Her latest film is Her Private Hell, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first feature in a decade. Thatcher stars as Elle, a movie star living in a neo-Tokyo high-rise as the legend of a supernatural killer known as the Leather Man closes in around her. Charles Melton also stars as an American soldier searching for his abducted daughter.

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