On Sunday afternoon, Melanie Lynskey was still wrapping her head around what was going to happen the next day. It would be the first Emmy Awards Lynskey would attend where she was nominated for best actress, and she was still wondering when she was going to process that fact.
“I think we all were making [Yellowjackets] because we loved it,” Lynskey told Vanity Fair, during this brief quiet moment between pre-Emmys events. “We—none of us—had an expectation. It’s not like the kind of thing you make for like awards bait. You know what I mean? It’s a horror show about teenage cannibals.”
In Yellowjackets, Lynskey plays a suburban mother fighting off midlife disenchantment and her ever-encroaching past, while in flashbacks, her younger self (Sophie Nélisse) fights off the aftershocks of a plane crash, the Canadian wilderness, hunger, spooky things in an abandoned cabin, etc. (Whether her character at any point turns to cannibalism is still to be determined, but season 2 is currently filming in Vancouver.) The Showtime series was nominated for seven Emmy’s total, including Lynskey’s best actress nomination.
By Jessica Amos.
Lynskey’s look for Monday night began, like so many good things do, with Sarah Paulson. They were at dinner recently, and the topic of what to wear to the Emmys came up. Lynskey told her the truth, that she and her stylist, her close friend Misha Rudolph, hadn’t yet decided what she was going to do, but they would figure it out.
“[Paulson] just got her phone out and started texting,” Lynskey said. “I was like, ‘Oh, she’s busy, I guess.’ And then she was like, I just texted blah, blah, blah. She texted all these people for me. Fancy people. Like, very fancy people. ”
Christian Siriano was the first to text back. “I felt very supported. Just everyone loves Sarah so much that people responded to her very quickly,” Lynskey explained. “She was saying to me, I hope you understand, like, people are excited for you. People want to dress you.”
“I sent her a very big bunch of flowers,” she added.
By Jessica Amos.