The Grim Reaper is never too far away when Lauren Ambrose is on television. “Servant,” an Apple TV+ psychological thriller from M. Night Shyamalan, builds a foundation on an incomprehensible tragedy that spirals into a test of faith and family, and the “Yellowjackets” body count continues to grow in both timelines. Not to mention that it has been nearly 20 years since “Six Feet Under” departed our screens with a finale that has stood the test of time and remains one of the great closing chapters in any era. Claire Fisher didn’t enter the family’s funeral business, but her green-painted hearse is a defining symbol of the series.
‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2 Remains Wild At Heart And Weird On Top [Review]
“If not today, when?” Ambrose replies over Zoom when I show her I am wearing a pin of Claire’s famous vehicle. The actress has just returned on a red-eye flight to her East Coast home after appearing at a “Yellowjackets” FYC event. We have a lot of ground to cover as “Servant” concluded its four-season run in March, and not everyone on “Yellowjackets” has made it to the end of Season 2 alive.
Ambrose made her long-awaited entrance as adult Van (Liv Hewson plays the teen version) at the end of the fourth episode when a desperate Taissa (Tawny Cyprus) hitchhiked to her ex’s very ’90s-themed small business before the six wilderness survivors—that we know about—converged at Lottie’s (Simone Kessell) wellness center. Years of secrets come bubbling to the surface before turning into a ritual from their time stuck in the middle of nowhere. “It’s really quite shocking. It was shocking to film. It was shocking to do; it was shocking to read when I got the script,” Ambrose says of the finale. “I think people will be taken aback, surprised, very devastating. But it also opens a lot of doors—a very intense thing to film.”
Shooting the end of “Servant” also ticks the intense box, a story that began with the death of a child and an unusual coping mechanism that opened the Turner family home to darker forces. Set in a Philadelphia brownstone, the series rarely left the city block and turned the Turner residence into the epicenter of strange activities. As Dorothy Turner, Ambrose plays an ambitious woman who has buried her trauma deep, and while the scale of the shows differs, it is impossible not to see thematic connections. Here, Ambrose reflects on her recent roles, finishing the intimate “Servant” and joining the mammoth cast of “Yellowjackets.”
Note this interview contains major spoilers for Yellowjackets and Servant
One of the first things I wanted to ask you about is the themes that run through several of your TV projects—including “Six Feet Under.” What are you drawn to about material that explores dynamics that grow, thrive, and fall apart within frameworks of trauma, grief, and guilt? I’m starting light!
This is a wonderful big thing to explore through art and through genre, which is kind of new to me to work in this thriller-horror genre world. It’s become one of my favorite places to be because you can go so far, whereas, maybe in a more traditional drama, it becomes ponderous. You can push the boundaries with these big ideas, and that’s fun, interesting storytelling—and all the things that go along with it. I can look back and go, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Yes, they do. sort of fit together, but they’re also wildly different characters.’ Like for me as the, as the actor playing them, they’re very different experiences, very different characters, very different productions. They all felt like very distinct jobs. But yes, I suppose thematically intertwined.
Had you finished the final season of “Servant” when you signed on to “Yellowjackets?”
Yeah, we were finishing up when I got the job. It was nice timing for once in my career.
