If you thought the survivors (except Coach Ben) eating Jackie was the most shocking twist of Yellowjackets season 2, think again. It’s only going to get darker, colder, and scarier in the woods. The survivors have crossed a line, and there’s no going back.
HollywoodLife spoke EXCLUSIVELY with Kevin Alves about the aftermath of feasting on Jackie and how it will bring out major “trust issues” amongst the survivors. He also opened up about Travis and Natalie’s relationship and how they’re bonded by their trauma. The actor stressed that “rough” times are ahead, and the scene that was “hardest” for him and many of the cast to shoot is yet to come. Read our Q&A below:
Have you gone down the Reddit rabbit hole at all regarding theories, or are you steering clear?
Kevin Alves: I’ve been down the red rabbit hole. I work hard not to because I could be there for 7 hours. I’ve seen some of the cool theories and some of the hilarious theories. These fans are committed, and I love that. I think it’s so cool that they have a community.
At the end of episode 2, the survivors decide to eat Jackie. This had been a long-gestating theory, but to see it was shocking. What was your reaction when you opened up the script and saw that the show was really going there?
Kevin Alves: I think the timing of it was fantastic because the show was really known in season 1 for being such a great slow burn, really revealing things in its own time. And then, season 2 really picks up the same way in that first episode. It’s exactly what you wanted the show to be like. This is great. We love the character development. And then we just throw it at you in episode 2, and it flips the whole show upside down and sends us in a totally different direction. I knew it was coming at some point, but the way in which the team decided to creatively put it together, I was blown away. And then on top of that, just reading it was one thing, but then to see what the vision that Ben [Semanoff] had to shoot it. I was like, wow, this is so messed up in such a cool way. It was shocking watching it for the first time. I saw that scene for the first time when I did ADR for that episode, and it was a moment. I had to take a breath there.
It was really interesting how their brains rationalized it with the feast. I thought it was such a great juxtaposition of they’re doing this crazy, horrific thing that’s shrouded as this lavish meal.
Kevin Alves: I think what was so great about the way they creatively put that together was it gives you insight into how they feel rather than what they’re doing. They feel like it’s ecstasy to them. It’s this crazy euphoric feeling. I think you get a little bit of insight as a viewer into that, rather than it just being feral. There’s something kind of beautiful about it in the most messed up way possible.
What can you say about the aftermath of this once they’ve realized they’ve crossed this line?
Kevin Alves: When you go through something like that, in a weird way, it brings you together. But then you start to question your beliefs and what you’re willing to do as a human to survive. Now we’re going to see this really weird community who has kind of accepted that they’re just not going to be rescued in their minds. I think we have these people who they’ve really given up that side of hope, except for a few people who really want to make it still happen. That’s where we’re going to find the conflict is in the people who have hope and the people who don’t in some ways. We’re going to be dealing with a lot of trust issues between each other, that’s for sure. There’s going to be a lot of butting heads.
Everyone’s going through crazy trauma on this show. I feel like Travis might have it a little worse than everybody else. Not only did he have to see his father dead and bury him, his brother ran off and could be dead. In episode 2, Natalie thinks it’s time for Travis to come to grips with the fact that Javi is likely dead. She fakes finding Javi’s bloody pants. She has good intentions, but it seems like this could come back to bite her. If Javi is alive somehow and Travis puts the pieces together about what Natalie did, do you think he could forgive her for that?
Kevin Alves: That’s going to be a tough task to ask that guy to forgive Natalie for that. That’s asking somebody to stop having hope for their only blood left there, so that’s not going to be easy. If there’s ever going to be forgiveness, it comes from the place of knowing that Natalie had the right intentions, both in season 1 when it came to Bobby Farley to make him feel better, to make him feel less insecure, and then now to make him move on and hopefully accept his fate with family. But we also know that Travis has quite a temper. We also know that he has a short fuse. We know that he’s not the most well-equipped to deal with his emotions. It’s going to be hard to ask him to forgive somebody for that. I think that’s a line that’s hard to cross. But I think the two of them have such a deep bond when it comes to grief, and when it comes to what they’ve been through that with the two of them, I never say never. When we talk about the whole trauma of losing people, I think there’s one that gets overlooked. We have Javi, who’s gone. We have his dad, who’s gone. But he feels a lot of guilt towards Jackie’s death as well because if he hadn’t given in and kind of tried to become a part of that community more for the first time and given into he wanted, his own temptations, then maybe Jackie would be alive, and maybe his brother wouldn’t be gone. So the guy’s already dealing with a lot of guilt. There’s going to be a lot of guilt in him stopping to look for his brother if it becomes the case.
In the first 2 episodes, we see this weird connection between Travis and Lottie. What’s going on there?
Kevin Alves: I think we’re going through a really deep confusion with Travis because he is feeling disconnected to Natalie. That’s the truth, and he’s trying to hold on to some sort of hope that it seems like Natalie doesn’t want to hold on to that hope. Lottie really does have this beacon of light and hope and kind of trusting what the wilderness in the world and everything else is going to give to them. I think when he starts to put his trust in Lottie in some ways, his feelings get confused. We see in episode 1 he gets aroused when she’s helping him through his panic attack. In episode 2, we see him start to have visions of her. But one thing I will say is in those visions, we do see her in a very motherly position always. It’s holding him, it’s looking down on him, so I definitely think that the timing of when he’s having these thoughts makes him very confused as to how he feels about Lottie and Natalie. It’s going to take a little bit for him to figure it out.
In my opinion, I don’t exactly believe Lottie is telling the entire truth about what happened regarding Travis’ death. I think her story was too perfectly laid out to be completely true. I keep coming back to this one quote from the first scene when Natalie said, “Travis never believed in any of this sh*t.” We’re starting to see the seeds planted in the past of this mystical, supernatural side with Lottie and the more practical side with Natalie and Coach Ben. Will we find out what Nat meant by that?
Kevin Alves: I think my 2-part answer here is, I think we can see from the first 2 episodes that Travis’ not so much hanging on to the wilderness and the mystical side of Lottie, but he’s holding on to the hope side of all this. Maybe just being able to do whatever he can do to help him get out of there in his mind, whatever he thinks is best he’s going to try. I think he expresses that to Natalie in episode 2. They’re walking and talking and he says,”Maybe we just don’t know everything. Maybe I don’t know everything, and maybe she just gives me a bit of hope. Simple as that.” That’s where they stand right now. But in the future timeline, I guess my personal opinion is, I don’t know how much any character is a reliable narrator for the past. I believe we live in a world of unreliable narrators when it comes to these survivors. I think that the tricky part that we run into with this storytelling is: who’s telling the truth?
The thing I love about this show is that there’s a lot of discussion about whether or not there truly is a supernatural element to the show. We just don’t know yet. I feel like Lottie’s visions and everything in the wilderness could be a psychological response to trauma, and how trauma can make them do things they wouldn’t normally do. If I was starving and freezing, I could probably make the most illogical things logical in my brain.
Kevin Alves: Absolutely. They’re starving. It’s cold. There’s a difference between summer and winter. I always use the analogy of, if you’re in scorching heat and you get out of your car and you got to go somewhere, you’re going to walk slow, you’re going to try and get there, you’re going to be exhausted. But when you are in freezing cold and you get out of your car, you’re going to run like hell to get inside wherever you’re getting to. What you’re willing to do in the cold is different than what you’re willing to do in the warmth. This is where we’re at now. What are these people willing to do? What is their human condition? What is each of their breaking points? When does everyone go, this is wrong. We can’t do this. Each character will have a different point for that. I think that we’ll continue to see where everyone’s breaking points are throughout the show.
It’s a matter of perception of how you view things and how you process the traumatic things that are happening in front of you. Everybody has a different type of response.
Kevin Alves: Who is a big factor, right? When you’re looking at these relationships, you’re going to be a lot more accepting of something happening with one person versus another, depending on who you are. We can see something, but the minute our loved ones are involved, things change. I think that’s a theme in this story. We’re kind of all figuring out like, well, what is our breaking point? Who’s our breaking point? Who can we trust? And who can we not? It’ll keep testing us while we’re out there.
I think you and Sophie [Thatcher] have the most rigorous job of trekking through the snow. Was that actually you guys out there in the thick of the snow?
Kevin Alves: That was us in Calgary. We were shooting about an hour away from Calgary up in the mountains where they shot The Revenant. We were out there. It was great. We had a very small crew. It wasn’t a massive crew when we went there. When we were driving, there was a storm and we were scared that it was going to keep snowing the next 2 days when we had to shoot. Luckily, we ended up being so grateful to have clear skies. It was freezing cold, and we had 4-foot snow above our knees. We were trekking through the deepest snow I’d ever checked through. But all in all, I think it added this beautiful element of the scope and how big this area is and where we are.
I’ve always had a small spot for Natalie and Travis from the beginning. Natalie was devastated by his death, and they went through a lot after they were rescued. In the past, there was a lot of love there. But there was a lot of confusion and trauma to process. We know Tai thought their relationship was “toxic.” What is your stance on their relationship?
Kevin Alves: I always go back to shooting episode 4 of season 1. Deepa Mehta was our director. She sat us down, and she told Sophia and me, “Listen, this is the foundation for everything you guys are about to build that’s going to lead to 25 years down the road. Where this starts is going to be what keeps you together forever and being in each other’s lives.” What we did was we really wanted to root their relationship and their mutual grief of their parents and their mutual feeling that they don’t belong with everybody else. I think when you have that, that’s what the relationship is built off of. There’s no way it can’t be toxic because you’re almost relying on each other. You need each other on a day-to-day basis to survive and to feel not alone. Even though there’s so much love there between the two of them, where they started was a place of mutual grief. We had this one scene where we were sitting there with an animal, and Travis calms Natalie down, she shoots it, and then we sit there. Deepa Mehta came up to the two of us and said, “This is not about the animal. This is the two of you grieving your fathers.” And that was it. That’s where we approach the scene. It was really messed up because when you’re connected to somebody via that, there’s no way that you guys don’t become ridiculously reliant on each other. I think that that’s just going to keep happening to them for 20 years. We see where things end, and it’s tragic, but there’s no question that there’s love there between the two of them. It’s tons of love.
They’re bonded together by something extremely traumatic. That binds you together forever, for better or for worse. Oftentimes that trauma bond is the only thing you know and can rationalize.
Kevin Alves: I think what people sometimes overlook when it comes to the Natalie and Travis storyline about once they’re rescued is that everyone else has kind of a real family to go to. They both have lost half of their family in different ways. They already have that trauma that they’re building, plus the trauma of the crash. Their dads being gone is a huge factor. They don’t feel like they have a lot of leadership. Especially in the ’90s, societal constructs make it that they both felt like they didn’t have any leadership. They’re stuck together because they’re going to keep relying on each other when they get back because other people are probably going to be around their families again and they’re just not.
Their relationship started in the wilderness, and it was almost set up to fail from the beginning. When you get outside of that high-stakes environment, how can anything ever measure up?
Kevin Alves: I think what’s tough is beyond addiction or something that you feel like you can’t control, there’s nothing that Travis wouldn’t do for Natalie at this point. And that’s hard when you have that level of love and commitment to each other so early on. They’re so young. They’re in the most out-of-this-world situation. It would be hard to ever let that go, so they’re kind of stuck. They’re bonded.
Are we in for bad times with them? I need some glimpse of happiness between them.
Kevin Alves: We’re in for a really rough time for everybody. This really is winter. There’s no getting around it. This is about survival now.
So, really, eating Jackie probably isn’t the worst thing they’re going to do this season.
Kevin Alves: I’ll tell you this much, it wasn’t the hardest scene that I shot. There was a scene that was harder to shoot than that.
Did it involve just Travis or did it involve other people?
Kevin Alves: I think a lot of people had a hard time shooting this scene.