Elijah Wood means different things to different people. To some, he’s defined by his early ’90s child actor roles, sweet little family dramedies like Radio Flyer or North or neo-Gothic horror like The Good Son, in which he’s the type of nice boy who’d make a great best friend or summertime crush. Or perhaps to you, Elijah Wood is defined by his late ’90s teen roles in which his innocence is tested by the fatal parental midlife crises of The Ice Storm or the killer teachers of The Faculty. But more than likely, it’s the Elijah Wood of The Lord of the Rings that sticks with you. As Frodo Baggins, Wood calls upon his entire actorly adolescence, first as the lovable, naive hobbit tasked with a tremendous burden, and later as the picture of wholesome guilelessness, gnarled and spoiled through its prolonged encounter with the evil forces of Mordor.
The Yellowjackets of Wisayok High School, whose plane crash-landed in the wilderness in the spring of 1996, were suburban teens in the mid-’90s, which is to say they all would have known Wood on sight. That’s what makes it so strange and so great and so wonderfully, specifically Yellowjackets when he shows up two episodes into the show’s second season. Of course he would.
Yellowjackets is a funny, violent, and compelling puzzle-box series, but its heart is in its stunt casting. 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. 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. For Gen X and elder millennial viewers who grew up with them, these actors signify worlds in and of themselves. The pulsing memory of these films with those faces accomplishes a tremendous amount of work for the show. 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.
Yellowjackets’ pilot uses this double vision to great effect. 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. 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. 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. And then, in the episode’s final moments, we cut to the present, and we see her all grown up. 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. 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. She’s unmistakably, viscerally Christina Ricci, whoever and whatever that means to you.
The word stunt might imply some thin spectacle, a brief, fleeting shock. But Yellowjackets works to prolong these moments of recognition, playing them off one another, asking us to hear both their dissonances and their unexpected harmonies. Like a person creating a mixtape, the show’s writers are lovingly (perhaps creepily) curating an experience for us, and each individual choice matters as much as the order of those choices and the surprise we feel when we hear something unexpectedly meaningful. The track list is representative of its maker in the same way it imagines and anticipates a relationship with the person who’s receiving it. It can sometimes be too much—an overshare, an unwelcome advance—just as it can sometimes become something treasured, personal. For good or ill, it can make us feel seen. It’s incredible, we might come to think, how much the people who made this know us.
A show built in this way works through the management of moods the way a face will irresistibly conjure for you, the viewer, a feeling. In every scene, Lewis carries the threat of orgiastic violence. 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. And Ricci’s Suburban Gothic, her fundamental strangeness, her comfort with the unsettling—what we recall from her childhood colors every moment as well.
A crucial element of this is not just iconicity but also the sense of these actors having been themselves lost. While, in various ways, Lewis, Ricci, and Wood all owned the ’90s, none experienced midcareer peaks as high as their youthful successes. One could charitably say they receded from the spotlight. All of them worked, but none were as well known as they were when the Yellowjackets might have known them. And so their characters are doubly resurrected, rescued—we don’t know how—from the wilderness and brought back to visibility by Yellowjackets itself.
Wood himself is only just starting to reemerge. The show handles our first spotting of Walter, his online true-crime obsessive, much the same way it handled Ricci in the pilot. Misty first hears him speaking loudly and confidently in the nursing home where she works. She’s sitting in an office, scanning the common area through a cutout window in the wall. Walter slowly pushes an elderly woman through the room; Misty clocks his shorts, dark socks, and sneakers, and turns away, repulsed. As he glides closer and closer to her (to us), he locks eyes with her (and sort of with us), slipping out a creepy grin, acknowledging that he sees us seeing him. Then, just like that, he’s gone.
She recognizes him; there’s chemistry there, it seems. Is it because he was in Flipper? Is it because they co-starred in The Ice Storm?
Who is this guy? What is he doing here? We know very little except what Wood’s face signifies for us. Slow-playing the introduction of his character is a brilliant move. 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. 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.
Maybe, though, he’s a creep. 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. 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. He’s playing, in other words, against type. Is this the version of Elijah Wood that just walked on screen in Yellowjackets?
These characters are all surreal echoes of their childhood selves, and even though we don’t have a flashback timeline for Wood’s character, we know intuitively who he was, because he represents some version of who we were. For a show already invested in its meta-referentiality, Wood introduces a wholly new layer, a figure of mystery who’s somehow strangely familiar. When Ricci locks eyes with him at the nursing home, does she feel the sting of age? Does she feel the comfort of nostalgia? Does she feel, for some reason she can’t place, afraid?
Regardless of what Misty sees, Elijah Wood likely means something to the viewer too. By teasing us with his presence, the show strings us along a bit more, refusing to really unveil which Wood it is we’re dealing with. And so, in this brief moment of locked eyes, it feels almost as if the show itself is staring back at us. All of its themes of lost innocence, the violence of growing up, the impossibility of purity, the blind, hopeful imagination of a world after trauma—these are the notes we hear most clearly when we get to Elijah Wood on the track list. Before he becomes something new, before he is resurrected, his presence becomes reflective; he is a mirror. Before it’s about him, it’s about you.
