Melanie Lynskey’s Radical Normal

On the day Melanie Lynskey and I are set to meet, there is a downpour in Los Angeles. It’s not just the rain everyone’s been praying for since the fires, but a full-scale weather event. It will end in mudslides that shut down a section of Highway 1, but for now, we’re still in the realm of the comically absurd — rivers of water coming down so hard and loud that you can’t help but laugh. When I see Melanie get out of her car and dart through the deluge in a calf-length tomato-red puffer jacket, I join her in the rain to wave her in and utter a string of apologies. But then I am reminded: this is Melanie Lynskey — gracious, Snow White beautiful, feels like an old friend.

I’ve invited Melanie to get cake together from the not-so-secret bakery at The Abbey, West Hollywood’s most historic and famous gay bar, while we do our interview. Since it’s noon on Thursday, the place is empty. And though we are now damp and droopy, the cake is ready for prime time: heart-shaped and perfectly moist. (It isn’t until I take my first bite of one of the confections in front of us that I remember Lynskey has misophonia. I chew as if my life depends on utter silence.)

I quickly learn that Melanie has a lot going on. She had volunteered to help out at her 6-year-old daughter’s kindergarten class party tomorrow. The big Valentine’s Day celebration requires plastic utensils and she’d signed up to bring them by at 8 a.m. sharp. “I was like, ‘Yeah, that seems fine, of course, I’d love to do that.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, it’s the day after the premiere,’” she tells me in her disarming New Zealand lilt.

The premiere, of course, is for Season 3 of Yellowjackets, the genre-defying hit show that has earned her two Emmy nominations and a Critics Choice award. Like Lynskey, her character Shauna Sadecki is a middle-aged mom. Unlike Lynskey, Shauna has been known to lie to reporters, tackle carjackers, and murder bunnies in her backyard.

Tonight is bound to be a late one, and at this point she still needs to go shopping for a dress to wear on the red carpet. (The one she’d originally picked out, she realized, is too low-cut, not to mention too close to the same color as the step-and-repeat itself; in photos, she insists, she’d “look like floating boobs.”)

The Valentine’s Day party, it turns out, has more riding on it than doilies and conversation hearts, and Lynskey is determined to make it work. Last night, as she headed out to a different work event, her daughter asked if she would consider getting another job — maybe one that didn’t require her to jet off at bedtime?

“I don’t think so?” Lynskey told her gently. “There’s nothing else I’m really good at.” Lynskey, whose breakthrough role was as a teenager alongside Kate Winslet in Peter Jackson’s 1994 murder-thriller Heavenly Creatures, has always wanted to act. “It was all I wanted,” she tells me. “From when I was my daughter’s age.” Does her daughter share that ambition? “No. Never. She’s like, ‘I don’t want to be an actor. It’s too hard. And you have to go away.’ But then she’ll also be like, ‘Now, watch my performance.’”

“I always have felt that [having kids] has to be the thing you want more than anything in the world for it to be worth it.”

During her childhood in New Zealand, Lynskey moved around a lot because her dad was in med school. Mom was a teacher. Little Melanie was painfully shy, she says, and didn’t have many friends. But when she auditioned for a school play out of nowhere at age 6 and got a little part in it, everything changed. “I still remember the freedom of walking onto a stage and having a line,” she says. “Not being like, ‘What do I say? What do I do? Who am I?’ Just being like, ‘Oh, now I’m this.’ I felt so confident. I was just like, ‘This is it.’”

Now 47, Lynskey’s been an extremely prolific working actor for 32 years, with an astounding 100 projects listed on her IMDB page. Given the sheer volume, what you know about her probably says as much about your own viewing taste as her decadeslong resume. Throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s, she was the rom-com’s supporting stalwart, with seared-into-your-brain (if smaller) roles in Ever After, But I’m a Cheerleader, and Sweet Home Alabama (the iconic “baby… in a bar?” role will always be with us). Next there was her Two and a Half Men era (let’s not talk about it) that enabled her to star in a slew of indie movies like Hello I Must Be Going and I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore (eight years later, she’s still in a daily group chat with Elijah Wood — who also joined Yellowjackets in Season 2 — and the filmmakers). In 2015, the short-lived but fiercely loved HBO domestic dramedy series Togetherness, in which Lynskey and Amanda Peet play sisters in their late 30s, burrowed her deep into the psyche of a certain slice of women, myself included, who saw themselves in her unguarded everywoman, trying to do her best as a new mom in a marriage.

With Yellowjackets, though, Lynskey has achieved a long-deserved level of notoriety. The show, which debuted in 2021 and was something of a surprise pandemic hit for Showtime, is about a high school girls soccer team whose plane crashes in the wilderness on their way to nationals. Lynskey loves that the characters are sporty and capable — though she’s still waiting for the Yellowjackets creators to showcase grownup Shauna’s athletic prowess. “I always want to have moments where you see that they were athletes and it never happens,” she says. “There was this one scene where we’re chasing out for the blackmailer and someone throws the keys to me. I’m quite good at catching, so every time I caught them. And then one time it was just awkward and they fell against me, they used that tape. The one tape out of 15 where I didn’t look cool! That's not fair.”

The show moves between the teen girls surviving the woods in 1996 — although not all teammates are so lucky — and the women they become, who in the present day are still haunted by what happened during the 19 months they were fighting for their lives. Sophie Nélisse plays the teen version of Lynskey's Shauna, and Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Simone Kessell, and Lauren Ambrose round out the adult cast. For its Gen X and elder millennial fans — of whom there are legion — the mix of nostalgia with nail-biting drama, plus the ‘90s soundtrack, hits just right.

For real-life Melanie, 1996 was also a weird year. Having just wrapped Heavenly Creatures, she headed back to high school and life as a normal teenager. Hollywood wasn’t exactly knocking down her door trying to get Lynskey into more roles, she explains. “It was a different time. There was a particular look that people were interested in, and mine was not like a great calling card for Hollywood.” It’s taken 30 years for the industry to — mostly — catch up to her talents.

Halfway through our heart-shaped cakes — well, mine at least; Lynskey politely takes a bite of hers before sheepishly admitting she’s not a cake person — I find myself still blown away by her accent: full-on Kiwi, a world away from of the American accent she so effortlessly deploys onscreen. Lynskey’s facility with accents also comes in handy on the parenting front. She and her daughter read books together at night; The First Cat in Space books are favorites (this is a woman with great taste), and the broad cast of characters gives Lynskey a chance to voice everything from a superhero cat in a spacesuit to a toenail-clipping robot. “It’s really fun. One day, she was like, ‘I’m sorry, Dad, but Mama is just better at doing voices than you,’” she says, switching into a flawless and adorable impression of the kindergartener.

Next thing I know I am weeping in the middle of an empty bar at a table that, in a few hours, a man in a G-string will be dancing on.

Voice acting is also a big part of Lynskey’s husband Jason Ritter’s equally long and winding career — which has also included live-action roles on Parenthood and Matlock. My own hard-to-impress children were awed by the idea that I would be meeting the person married to the voice of Dipper Pines in Gravity Falls — not to mention reindeer-loving Ryder in Frozen 2. (Others might know him as the son of dearly departed comedy legend John Ritter.) When Lynskey and Ritter’s daughter was a baby, she got her tiny hands on a toy version of Ryder. “She called it Cozy Dada,” Melanie tells me affectionately. “I think because he had a fur vest on. She was like, ‘Mama, we got to bring Cozy Dada.’”

Lynskey met Ritter, who she married in 2020, on the set of the indie friendship dramedy The Big Ask in 2013 (The Big Chill echoes are intentional), and then went on to work with him in two more movies right after. I take a big bite of my cake and suggest to her that Ritter, who’s 45, is maybe “babygirl.” Her eyes get wide, and I realize that internetspeak — my own first language — may be the one dialect Lynskey hasn’t mastered. I try to explain: Babygirl is like, safe men? Good men? Where you just want to pet their head? Like Pedro Pascal? Like, he’s daddy, but he’s also babygirl? Now she gets it, adding that Pascal, with whom she worked closely on HBO’s zombie drama The Last of Us, is “lovely and the greatest.” And — she indulges me — yes, he is very handsome.

To recover from my bumbling — and also because I am dying to know — I ask Lynskey if the urge to procreate came when she met Ritter or if she always knew she wanted to be a mom. With disarming matter-of-factness, she says that, no, she did not know before partnering up with Ritter. “I think because I had a lot of responsibility growing up?” she says.

Eldest daughter?

“Yeah. Eldest daughter,” she replies, nodding.

Lynskey and her first husband, the actor Jimmi Simpson (they were married for seven years, between 2007 and 2014), talked about starting a family, she says, but could never get past their ambivalence. “I always have felt that it has to be the thing you want more than anything in the world for it to be worth it. Because you don’t want to put that on your kids: ‘Here’s what I could have been doing.’ That’s the worst. So I just wasn’t really sure. And then, I don’t know, it really hit me one day and I was like, ‘Oh, here, it is. It’s all I want.’”

Once she made up her mind, Lynskey desperately wanted a baby. She did not, however, enjoy being pregnant: “I wasn’t excited about that at all. And I wasn’t one of those glorious pregnant women.” Before she’d told anyone that she was pregnant, she was invited to audition for a big horror movie. “In the audition, the director and the writer were like, ‘We’ve got to really see you go there with the screaming — be really physical with it,’” she recalls. But she just couldn’t. “I felt so protective of this little being and I was like, ‘Oh God, is it going to work out? Is it going to be OK?’ I didn’t want to be screaming.” She didn’t get the part. And in fact, she didn’t work at all during her pregnancy — which turned out to be a good thing, she tells me, given that in her final trimester she retained so much water that the skin on her ankles split open.

“A friend of mine was saying, ‘I envy you because you know who you are in your 40s. You’re not second-guessing yourself. You’re smarter than you ever were.’”

Maybe it was her age — she was 41 when her daughter was born — but she didn’t feel any pressure to give birth a certain way. “I just was like, ‘I’m going to be in a hospital,’ and I’m glad I was because it was a complicated delivery, and if it was like a home birth or whatever, she wouldn’t have made it,” Lynskey says. (Still, she adds, “I waited a long time to have an epidural, and when I did have the epidural, I was like, ‘Why didn’t I do this hours ago?’”) Her daughter was almost 10 pounds and turned backwards in the birth canal. “It was so painful. I couldn’t see for a minute. I was wandering around. I was like, ‘I can’t see anything. I can’t see anything.’ It was so insane. It’s not the kind of thing you can just breathe through.”

I wonder aloud if, once she had the baby, she was worried that motherhood would engulf her career or hold her back in some way. “Nope,” she says, “I didn’t have that at all. I didn’t care. I was just so happy.” Maybe that too was the age factor. “I just had a conversation like this with a friend of mine who has an older kid. She was saying like, ‘I kind of envy you because you know who you are in your 40s. You’re not second-guessing yourself, you’re very settled and you’re smarter than you ever were.’” Though, there are always trade-offs: “It’s difficult because there are some days where I look at my daughter and I’m just doing calculations in my head, like when she’s 25, how old am I going to be?”

Lynskey is very close with her four younger siblings, all of whom have kids of their own: Her daughter has 16 cousins under the age of 7 — a built-in village of sorts. Since becoming a mother in 2018, Lynskey has spoken publicly (and generously) about pregnancy loss and IVF. After a recent cousins visit, her daughter announced that she didn’t need a sibling. “She’s like, ‘I’m good.’ She likes having the house back.”

When Lynskey snagged her Critics Choice Awards for Yellowjackets’ first season, she went viral for thanking her nanny, Sally, during her acceptance speech. “She’s an absolute angel,” she said on stage. “She’s with my child and my child is safe and taken care of and she allows me to go and do my work.” It was a moment she hadn’t thought much of at the time, but acknowledging the logistics of work and motherhood — and the people behind the scenes who make it possible — struck many people as radical.

Yellowjackets was her first award in the Critics Choice echelon. But if it’s not clear from her grounded, hilarious, deeply realistic performances, Lynskey is an actor actor — the real deal. She’s said she operates more by instinct than any kind of precision training. And when she describes a bit of her process to me, her devotion is obvious. “Sometimes it’s like a weird kind of grab bag: images, memories, colors,” she says, a kind of thrill wavering through her voice. “You sort of drop into it, almost like meditating, and then just kind of see what comes up.” As she says this, I am embarrassed by how moved I am, and then next thing I know I am weeping in the middle of an empty bar at a table that, in a few hours, a man in a G-string will be dancing on. I try to explain what I’m feeling but come up short.

“There are some days where I look at my daughter and I’m just doing calculations in my head, like when she’s 25, how old am I going to be?”

“I mean, it does feel a bit like art is in danger right now,” she offers, which is some of what I’m reacting to. More so, I can now see that I was simply moved and grateful that someone like Melanie exists and, at 47 years old, is thriving. And in a career where she’s celebrated for portraying complicated women going through sh*t. (Lynskey is a proud member of Miranda July’s All Fours group chat, and yes she has the hat.)

In the era of video shorts and recycled IP, here we have a category-defying television show, centering on the stories of a group of middle-aged women — with this thoughtful, beautiful (heavenly?) female creature at top billing. As Lynskey’s mom-friend told her about having kids later, she’s smarter than she's ever been. And it feels so good — as a viewer, and also as a human — to watch it pay off. Her talent deepens, her roles get more and more complex (and central). Best of all, to me, I get the sense that she understands how precious this is — her talent, this moment — and that she is alive to it.

Speaking of art and middle age, she can’t help but tell me, beaming, about a friend of hers from New Zealand, who published her first novel at 41, a feminist murder mystery, a few years ago to huge success. “We’ve been friends since we were 13. She’s so brilliant. And that’s the thing that makes me emotional. She has not had it easy. And she’s always been this talented and then she just f*cking did it.” Now Lynskey is helping her produce it to be a miniseries.

Before she embarks on her dress hunt for tonight, I ask her if she’s been getting recognized a lot lately. Not too often, she says. “Maybe once a day.” She’s good at being invisible, and I think tenderly of baby Melanie, finding her place onstage. (Her husband, on the other hand, is the opposite, she says with affectionate annoyance. He makes eye contact with strangers, smiles at everyone in the airport, “completely open to the world.” Classic babygirl behavior, I do not say.)

We say our goodbyes after I apologize a few more times for the rain and also the cake ("You’re a good eater!" she tells me, and I feel like I can breathe again). It’s only after she heads to her car that people start approaching me, wanting to tell me how much they love her. “OK I totally recognized her!” our waiter says. “Oh my God — she is so funny in everything she does. And she’s so nice! I didn’t know she was from Australia?” New Zealand, I correct him, delighted to share my intel. Right on his heels, the only other current Abbey patron slinks over, and asks me if I’m also “in acting.” He too wants to tell me how much he loves Melanie, and I love hearing it. He recounts every beat of their friendly, two-line conversation as she passed him on the way to her car. “She was so kind! So generous. She told me to be safe! You know, because of the rain.” We grinned at each other, nodding, as if there was ever any question.