The Showtime drama series Yellowjackets (which has already been picked up for a second season) is part survival, part psychological horror, and part coming of age tale that follows a team of high school girls' soccer players that survive a plane crash deep in the wilderness and have to do unspeakable things to stay alive long enough to be rescued. At the same time, we also see the young women who made it through that ordeal 25 years later, each coping with what they went through in different ways, but now all fighting their demons together.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Christina Ricci (who plays Misty, the socially awkward outsider both as an assistant to the team when she was younger and as a friend to them in the present) talked about what makes Misty such a great character, how little she knows about what’s to come on the show, collaborating with her younger counterpart Samantha Hanratty, her own fascination with true crime, and how shocking things will be as they play out in the present. She also talked about her first experience making movies with Mermaids, and what it was like to reunite with Lana Wachowski on The Matrix Resurrections.

Collider: I’m so hooked on this show. It’s quite a fun ride to watch, and I would imagine it must have been really fun and different, as an actor, to do something like this.

CHRISTINA RICCI: Yeah. It’s a really great character. I love playing her. For so long and so regularly people, you have to play people who are likable and relatable. There’s this presumption that the audience isn’t interested in anyone that they don’t recognize themselves in. To me, that’s not as much fun. That’s not exciting and it’s not interesting. And so, to play somebody who is so different and who really is shunned from society and rejected socially and has no social currency, but is still buoyant and gleeful and powerful, in her own kind of petty way, is really fun.

Doing a TV show, just by its nature, you don’t get to know everything. How much did you know about how this would unfold and what this would be?

RICCI: We were not told very much. It’s really frustrating. We weren’t told a lot. For me, it was a really different experience. I’ve been involved with television before, but the last couple of television projects I worked on, I was an EP on, so I knew everything. This is one of my first experiences with really not knowing what was coming. It’s a different process. It’s interesting. I still don’t really know what’s happening next season.

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Image via Showtime

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One of the things that really impressed me about this is that, even though you have this is big cast, and this is double the cast with the younger versions of the characters as well, we still get to feel like we really know everybody, or at least are getting to know all of the characters. How did you work that out for yourself, so that you could incorporate what your younger counterpart was doing?

RICCI: I met with Samantha [Hanratty] and we discussed Misty. There’s a clinical aspect for Misty. There’s some sort of diagnosis there and we had to decide not just who she was, but what she was. And then, that decision informs a lot of the rules of the character, which is really helpful. When you’re dealing with such an extreme character, you wanna make sure there’s a certain set of rules, so that no matter who comes in to direct or what is written, there’s always going to be a grounded version of this character.

There are so many elements and layers going on in this story, with the friendships, the survival aspect, the mystery, the thriller aspect, and I felt this constant sense of dread while watching it because you’re always waiting for something bad to happen. What were the aspects that you most connected with? If you had to tell somebody what genre this show is, what does it feel like to you?

RICCI: It feels like a Stephen King book to me. That was something I was so excited about because, in the beginning, when they discussed this, that wasn’t a reference that I heard. And then, after the third script read-through, I wrote to the EPs and was like, “Oh, my God, it’s so reminiscent of Stephen King. It’s so exciting.” And they were like, “Great! Yay! That’s what we want.” And that’s really fun because that’s my favorite stuff.

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Image via Showtime

Was this character always so quirky on the page? Was that something you also tried to develop in your performance?

RICCI: I like a more straightforward version of Misty. Because she is so odd and so not likable at her core, there is a tendency to try to make her “quirky,” so that was something I really tried to make come from somewhere real. I don’t think that you need to make the character likable. The character is interesting enough without it. You don’t need to make her relatable because the core essence of what she wants is so relatable. As an adult, for me, I always try to find the most real, grounded version of who this person would be.

She seems like someone who just wants to be involved and be a part of whatever is going on, and since she’s learned that other people aren’t going to voluntarily invite her and include her, she will take matters into her own hands to make it happen. Do you feel like that comes from an innocent place or does that ever feel calculated?

RICCI: I feel like it does. What’s so interesting about this is that you get to see these characters and their original, true desires and intentions, uncomplicated. Youth is complicated, but certainly not in the way adults are complicated. And so, you get to see Misty and all she wants is to be a part of something, to be a part of a team, and to be accepted. And then, when you see her as an adult, it’s really been 25 years of rejection and confirmation that she’s never going to be given these things. The way for her to get them is the way that she gets them when she’s stranded, which is to manipulate, force, and exert and try to take power over other people. You see that all of her fun is had by herself. It doesn’t matter who’s there. Natalie’s not really nice to her, but she so covets the Natalie version of an outsider that just being around her is fine. It’s almost like she doesn’t care what this person says or does, as though she’s really drained the humanity from people around her, the way that she feels her humanity has been taken from her.

I really love the odd couple dynamic between Natalie and Misty. I loved watching the two of you together on the little road trip that your characters go on, even though their personalities could not be more different. What did you enjoy about finding and exploring that with Juliette Lewis? I could just watch the two of you on a spinoff, doing crazy things together.

RICCI: It was really fun. Working with Juliette was great. We work very similarly. We have similar backgrounds in the industry. We got along really well. We had a very good time, filming all of that stuff. It was really nice to have a partner in that.

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Image via Showtime

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I found it so delightful to watch them, even though there are things about the dynamic that also make you uncomfortable.

RICCI: Yeah, it’s very interesting. Sometimes it wouldn’t necessarily make sense and we’d boil it back down to, these are people who’ve gone through such trauma together, almost like a dysfunctional family might be bonded. They don’t necessarily like each other, but they just are so dependent or comfortable or used to each other.

You’ve been in this business a long time. What was the earliest experience you had on a set, that a really positive, really memorable experience for you, and that you feel like you learned a lot from, and that was a turning point for you, in how you saw acting?

RICCI: My first experience making movies was on Mermaids, and that was an incredibly positive experience for me. I learned everything about acting and movie-making, on that movie.

Being able to learn to trust yourself and your instincts, as an actor, from the very beginning, must have been really helpful.

RICCI: Yeah, it was great. I’ve always had a natural proclivity for it, or I did when I was a child. You’re right, to be on a set where you are encouraged and it so positive and you feel like what you do naturally is the right thing, was very, very positive for me.

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Image via Showtime

What was it like to finally get to reunite and work with Lana Wachowski again, on The Matrix Resurrections? After having done Speed Racer together, how was it to work with her, so many years later, with her now as a solo director?

RICCI: It was great. There are certain directors and film set where, when you get to them and you start working, you thought you were making movies before, but this is really what filmmaking is. And certainly, working with Lana, has always felt that way.

It seems like a very creative and artistic environment.

RICCI: And so smart and technologically-minded and high-concept. You just feel like people are doing math, all the time, in their brains. It’s really, it’s really amazing.

Misty has dubbed herself a super sleuth. How much will that come in handy, the deeper they get into things, and how much is that going to get her in trouble because she thinks she knows what she’s doing?

RICCI: Misty is obsessed with crime. Naturally, somebody who has been so rejected from mainstream society would be obsessed with the sublayers and with maybe more deviant behaviors. She is obsessed with crime, knowing about criminals, murderers, and the logistics of it. We’ll see how much that helps or hinders, later on.

Was that something that you looked into, yourself? In figuring out Misty, did you look into people like her, who are obsessed with true crime?

RICCI: I actually really know a lot about crime, myself, and serial killers and all of that stuff. I was always fascinated by it, from a place of fear. That is one place that people come from, when they are obsessed with it. There’s something about understanding the limits of humanity and human beings and what people are capable of. For me, it’s always been fear-based, whereas I think for Misty, it’s more about people who create their own worlds and exert their own power and who can’t, through normal acceptance and social norms, have the happiness they want. It’s fascinating and it’s so individual. People can’t be boiled down to stereotypes or generalizations, and that’s so fascinating. That’s the most fun to play – a character that you’ve never seen before, but that makes sense.\

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Image via Showtime

How surprised do you think viewers will be with how these twists and turns play out, up to the end of the season?

RICCI: The survival was extreme. The experience was extreme. They have not left that capacity for extreme experience in the past. Much the same way that a trauma survivor or an abuse survivor allows that kind of stuff into their life, as adults or later on down the road, these women are capable of the same thing. So, as extreme as things were when they were stranded, things get very extreme and surprising and shocking, and all of these lines get crossed, in a similar way, in the present.

As far as what they went through and how it’s affect them, would you say that Misty has dealt with things the best, the worst, or somewhere in the middle?

RICCI: I think she’s the most high-functioning of the whole group. I think she has the least amount of problem with what went on. I don’t think she feels bad about it. I don’t think she’s afraid of anyone finding out about it. She wants that experience back and she wants her life to feel that way again. In that sense, she comes from the strongest place because she has no fear.

Yellowjackets airs on Sunday nights on Showtime.