There are few nights on the WWE calendar that are more exciting and unpredictable than the Royal Rumble. It’s one of those big wrestling shows where it feels like anything can happen at any given moment, and more times than not, that’s exactly what happens. And on top of having new number-one contenders for the top male and female titles in the company, the Royal Rumble also gives fans a lot to celebrate, especially with some of those surprise entrants. Here are 10 of the best…
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John Cena (2008)
Years before John Cena became a viral dance sensation with the Peacemaker opening, he was the biggest thing to happen to professional wrestling since Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. There was a stretch of time when the fans were eating out of the palm of his hand, and that has never been more true than the 2008 Royal Rumble.
Leading into the big event, John Cena had been out of action for a few months after undergoing surgery and it looked he wouldn’t be back in time for the Royal Rumble. Well, the thousands of diehard fans at Madison Square Garden and millions watching at home were in for the surprise of a lifetime when Cena came out in the 30-spot. I mean, just listen to this reaction.
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Edge (2020)
The 2020 Royal Rumble was one of the last major WWE live events before the company shifted to a closed-doors setup due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it certainly was a night to remember thanks to the return of Edge, aka the Rated-R Superstar.
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Prior to the event, Edge had not wrestled a match of any kind since shocking the wrestling world with his heartbreaking 2011 retirement announcement, and for a while there it looked like he would never lace up the boots again. That all changed when Edge’s electric entrance music filled Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas, with tens of thousands of screaming fans jumping from their seats. And even though he didn’t win the match, Edge got his moment the following year.
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AJ Styles (2016)
AJ Styles coming to WWE was one of the worst kept secrets in professional wrestling in early 2016, but it still didn’t make his debut at that year’s Royal Rumble any less shocking. Coming in at the number-three spot, “The Phenomenal One” quickly made his presence known in the WWE by staying in the match for nearly 30 minutes before being eliminated by Roman Reigns.
One of the best parts about AJ Styles’ debut is that brief moment of uncertainty between when his music first hit and the words “I Am Phenomenal” appeared across the Titantron, which was quickly followed by one of the loudest “pops” in Royal Rumble history.
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Booker T (2011)
Booker T, one of the most successful former WCW wrestlers who came over to WWE, was away from the company from 2007 to 2010, and a return to his second home wasn’t even on the radar. And then the 21st entrant in the 2011 Royal Rumble was called and then “Can you dig it, sucka!” played over the speakers at Boston’s TD Garden.
The former five-time WCW World Heavyweight Champion only lasted a minute before being eliminated but it was more than enough to announce his return to WWE after a prolonged absence and the fans were more than eager to welcome him home.
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Kharma (2012)
Kharma (who wrestled in various other companies as Awesome Kong) is one the biggest what-ifs in modern WWE history, but her first and only match with the company — the 2012 Royal Rumble — is is one to remember.
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Shortly after making her debut in 2011, the former TNA Knockouts Champion took a leave of absence after she became pregnant and was out of action for an extended period of time until she made her surprise entrance in the Rumble, becoming the third female wrestler (joining Chyna and Beth Phoenix) to enter the match. She was only in the ring for a minute, but Kharma was credited with two eliminations and proved she was as dominant as ever.
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Rey Mysterio (2018)
From 2002 to 2015, Rey Mysterio was one of the most successful WWE superstars, both in terms of in-ring victories and fan support. Following his departure, the masked high-flyer appeared in various promotions around the world, but made his shocking return at the 2018 Royal Rumble.
Not only would Rey Mysterio return to a huge ovation from fans, but he looked absolutely jacked and moved around the ring like it was January 1998, not 2018. The 2006 Rumble winner and former WWE Champion would end up lasting an impressive nine minutes and kicked off the next phase of his career.
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The Three Faces Of Foley (1998)
Over the years, Mick Foley has had three legendary characters — Cactus Jack, Mankind, and Dude Love — all three characters appeared in 1998 Royal Rumble. Commonly referred to as “The Three Faces of Foley” the charismatic wrestler made history by being the first and only competitor to show up three times in the same match.
The surprise wasn’t as legendary as those that would follow in the years following the 1998 Royal Rumble, but watching Mick Foley show up as three different wrestlers with different personalities was an absolute treat for everyone watching.
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Chris Jericho (2013)
Chris Jericho surprised WWE fans around the world when he entered the 2013 Royal Rumble as the second participant and effectively resuming his feud with Dolph Ziggler that had resulted in Y2J’s contract being “terminated” five months earlier.
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One of the most beloved wrestlers of the past 30 years, Chris Jericho’s return was one of the best moments of that year’s Rumble though he would be written off TV later that year so he could focus on touring with his band Fozzy.
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Trish Stratus (2018)
The inaugural Women’s Royal Rumble match in 2018 featured a who’s who of former WWE superstars making their return to the ring. And while the likes of Lita, Molly Holly, and the Bella Twins all made splash in the 30-woman event, nothing quite compared to the surprise return of Hall of Famer Trish Stratus.
Coming as the final competitor, Trish Stratus received a prolonged ovation from the crowd who couldn’t get enough of the seeing the former Women’s Champion returning after nearly a seven-year absence.
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Diesel (2011)
And there is Diesel, aka Kevin Nash, aka Big Daddy Cool, who was a surprise entrant in the 2011 Royal Rumble. Although Nash had worked with the company nine years earlier with the WWE debut of NWO, the Diesel character hadn’t been on TV in 15 years, making the moment all the more shocking.
Diesel would only last a few minutes and didn’t record any eliminations, but presence of Kevin Nash has always been his biggest selling point. Maybe that’s why his John Wick character is remembered so well after all these years.
These are just some of the great Royal Rumble surprise entrants from over the years. Who knows, maybe this list will grow after the 2022 Royal Rumble airs Saturday, January 29 on WWE Network on Peacock.
They say it’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary, and that’s likely particularly true if you’ve been denied access to those things for an extended period of time. After Britney Spears was released from the conservatorship she’d been under, the singer has been reintroducing herself to some of life’s simple pleasures. Last summer Spears was super pumped about regaining the freedom to drive, and in January the “Toxic” singer documented drinking her first glass of wine in over a decade. The newlywed continued to celebrate the post-conservatorship life by sharing her first trip to a bar.
Fans of the former pop singer are accustomed to seeing Britney Spears dancing and twirling and modeling different outfits at her and Sam Asghari’s new home. However, the “Toxic” singer took her followers on an exciting field trip, in which she and her assistant patronized a local drinking establishment. She shared her trip — and a sarcastic remark — on Instagram:
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As she and her assistant Victoria Asher apparently enjoyed a drink and an app, Britney Spears couldn’t help but throw a little shade at her family, remarking that she was “so so grateful” for not being allowed to have a cocktail for the 13 years after her father Jamie Spears took control of her life. In fact, the 40-year-old said in her post this is her first time to partake in such an adventure. In the video, she shared:
This is my first time at a bar. First time. I feel so fancy, and I feel so sophisticated.
Britney Spears definitely deserves to enjoy all of the fancy and sophisticated things in life. It was a lot more than the keys to the car and a glass of wine that were denied Britney for those 13 years. She’s compared her Jamie’s Spears’ treatment of her to sex trafficking, saying she was forced to work against her will seven days a week with no days off. She testified that she was not allowed to get married or remove her IUD to try to have another baby.
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She also said she was not allowed to perform new music or remix her old songs, and it seems like that’s another freedom she’s taking back. It’s been reported that the “Baby One More Time” singer met with Elton John to do a duet of “Tiny Dancer in a “super secret” recording session. Her new husband Sam Asghari also has hinted that his wife hopes to return to performing at some point.
Speaking of Sam Asghari, the end of the conservatorship meant that Britney Spears was finally allowed to marry her longtime boyfriend, who proposed in September 2021. Spears and Asghari tied the knot in a fairytale wedding June 9, in front of friends including Paris Hilton, Drew Barrymore and Madonna, before embarking on a two-week yacht honeymoon. The free life certainly looks good on the former pop star, and even as the court battles related to Spears’ conservatorship continue, we love to see her taking full advantage of her freedom.
Sure, they may have eaten a person back in the day. But there are some things the grown women of Yellowjackets just wouldn’t do. On this, the actresses who play them — Tawny Cypress, Juliette Lewis, Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci — agree, as they gather in a backyard in L.A.’s Topanga Canyon in late July, just a few weeks before they start filming the second season of their breakout show.
The Showtime survival thriller, created and executive produced by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, earned seven Emmy nominations, including outstanding drama series and acting nominations for Lynskey and Ricci. The Yellowjackets storyline alternates between 1996 and the present day as it follows members of a high school girls soccer team whose plane crashes and strands them for 19 months in the wilderness, where they resort to cannibalism to survive.
Part of the show’s nostalgic appeal relies on its casting of these actresses, three of whom audiences knew as young women for their slyly offbeat roles in films like The Addams Family (Ricci), Cape Fear (Lewis) and Heavenly Creatures (Lynskey), to play the crash survivors as adults. In this conversation with THR, Cypress, Lewis, Lynskey and Ricci disclose their ’90s regrets, share what it means when you call an actress “quirky” and reveal how survival bonds women — including in the trenches of Hollywood.
Who here knew each other before the show?
MELANIE LYNSKEY (Points to Christina Ricci.) We knew each other a little bit. I went to a Nick Cave concert by myself, and Christina came up and —
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CHRISTINA RICCI I was very excited to see you.
LYNSKEY So excited. We were having a lovely chat, and then she’s like, “Are you here by yourself?” She’s the coolest person of all time, and I was intimidated. I just felt embarrassed to say, “I’ve come to a concert by myself.” I was like 24 or something.
RICCI I was impressed because I couldn’t go anywhere by myself.
LYNSKEY I also went to see Clay Aiken by myself because nobody would come with me.
It’s surprising that none of you had worked together over the years.
JULIETTE LEWIS It’s wild when you’ve been around so long, and you sort of have a kindred connection to people. There’s certain actors you’re like, “Mmm, we’re not of the same tree,” and then there’s other actors you’re like, “Oh, yeah. We have some roots.”
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Juliette, Melanie and Christina, all three of your Wikipedia entries say some version of, “Often plays quirky or offbeat characters.” What do those words mean to you?
LEWIS Real people, specific and unpredictable.
LYNSKEY I remember I got cast in a movie when I was like 21, and the description of the character before I auditioned was “Blah, blah, blah, the beautiful girl who sits next to him in school.” Then, at the table read, it had been changed to “Blah, blah, blah, cute and quirky.” I was like, “You don’t need to change it. Just keep it …” They’re like, “We better change this description or people will be like, wrong actress.” So, sometimes it feels … I don’t know. I never liked that word, “quirky.”
RICCI When you say that all of us had this description, that to me speaks to a past time, when, if you weren’t the leading-lady ingenue then you were quirky and offbeat. All right, so there’s two groups for actresses? In a way, I’m fine with being in the category I’m in because what it means to me is that I have made an effort in my career to do things that I feel like I haven’t seen before. So, in some ways, I like it. In other ways, I’m like, “Ugh.” It’s a little dismissive. A little cute and dismissive.
LEWIS We come from the ’90s where, when I had blond hair, I was the pretty airhead, and then I dyed my hair dark, and I was the wisecracking, sarcastic girl. But yeah, I think it’s really neat that we’ve all carved this path of range and specificity.
Isn’t another term for that “character actor”?
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RICCI But “character actress” used to be something they used to describe an ugly woman.
TAWNY CYPRESS Or Abe Vigoda.
RICCI Back in the late ’90s, my agents were always like, “We have to be so careful you don’t become a character actress. If we’re not careful, you’re going to end up just like Jennifer Jason Leigh.” I was like, “I like her.” They were so afraid of me not being a leading lady, of me not being sexually attractive to people. It was really the last thing I ever wanted, was for anyone to be attracted to me.
LEWIS My dad was a character actor. So to me, it was something that was super noble. It was a world of adventure and not limiting. I rebelled against the system, the PR system of being in some bizarre idea of beauty. I really revolted against that, for better or for worse. Crying in a bathroom at a photo shoot, like, “I won’t come out.” They want these doe-eyed looks. That’s for sure what I didn’t do in pictures, so I always looked slightly insane, which I prefer over, like, “Do you want to fuck me?”
Tawny, what was your sense of what the expectations were for you when you were starting out?
CYPRESS I’ve had a different row to hoe. I’ve spent my whole career doing shitty roles of the sassy one on the side. Honestly, growing up as an actor, I wanted to be an ingenue.
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LEWIS Isn’t that funny? And I wanted to be sassy and opinionated.
CYPRESS I couldn’t be an ingenue. I just couldn’t. It’s just not in me, you know? I was never presented with those roles, ever, and I was like, “Oh, OK. That’s not who I am.” I sort of, growing older, have embraced my Jersey side, and I am who I am, and this is what you get.
LYNSKEY I started calling myself a character actor in interviews when I was really young because I think it was reclaiming the term or something. I think I just was like, “That’s what I am.” My agents had all that kind of intensity around it, too. I remember when I did Coyote Ugly —
RICCI Oh my God, you got a piece in that? I went up for that, and I didn’t get it.
CYPRESS I did too.
LYNSKEY I played the best friend from Jersey. But the scrutiny that was on Piper [Perabo], who’s one of the coolest, smartest women, just the way people were talking about her body, talking about her appearance, focusing on what she was eating. All the girls had this regimen they had to go on. It was ridiculous. I was already starving myself and as thin as I could possibly be for this body, and I was still a [size] four. That was already people putting a lot of Spanx on me in wardrobe fittings and being very disappointed when they saw me, the costume designer being like, “Nobody told me there would be girls like you.” Really intense feedback about my physicality, my body, people doing my makeup and being like, “I’m just going to help you out by giving you a bit more of a jawline and stuff.” Just the feedback was constantly like, “You’re not beautiful. You’re not beautiful.” In your early 20s, so much of it is about beauty, and how people respond to you, and do people want to fuck you? Do people think you’re their best friend? Even the best friend thing, I started to be like, “I don’t want to do that too many times.”
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Did you have to unlearn anything that people tried to teach you when you were starting out?
LEWIS I had developed such a survival mechanism to protect my autonomy, sort of, “You don’t own me. You don’t tell me my value. Only I do.” I was extremely self-critical — it still happens — of my work. It’s almost like a defense mechanism that no one could talk shit about me more than I can. There’s all these things that are wrapped up in how to survive a system. That’s what I’m unlearning today — to be softer. This is a really remarkable industry to be a part of. I feel honored to be a part of it and what it gave me, but I do still hold on to what it took from me in my youth.
Given what you all experienced coming into the industry, do you feel at all protective of the younger actresses who play the younger versions of your characters?
LYNSKEY (Begins to cry.) So much. I feel very protective. At the beginning of production, I sent them all an email, and I just was like, “Whatever you need, if you need a voice, if you need someone to go to the producers for you, whatever you need,” and they were kind of like, “Cool. Thanks.” They’re fine.
CYPRESS Totally fine. Jas [Jasmin Savoy Brown] was a boss on set. She’s like, “This is how we’re doing my hair. This is what we’re doing.”
RICCI They’re very much of a different generation.
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CYPRESS I am protective of Jas in the fact that she is so sexually positive, which I love. She has taught me so much, just knowing her as a person. But I’m like a mama bear to her, or a big sister. I’m like, “What are you putting online right now?” She’s like, “Whatever. Whatever. This is life, man. I love myself.” I’m protective, but I’m also in awe of her, you know?
LEWIS But there is a thing I always want to say to young people: Cultivate other interests deeply so that you’re not getting all your life’s blood from this industry, or your self-worth.
Is there anything you miss about the ’90s?
LYNSKEY I have a lot of love letters from the ’90s.
RICCI Someone used to fax me love letters when he was on tour. I did not save them. I throw everything out. I had a specific thing when I was a child, that we would be punished by the things that we loved being destroyed. My husband, who is a much healthier individual, has gone back and found all my old magazine covers on Etsy because he thinks it’s horrible that I never saved them. As a child, I learned that this is going to be taken from me, so why save it anyway?
LYNSKEY That’s heartbreaking. Well, I saved everything because I’m basically an emotional hoarder. I have this literal suitcase, an old-fashioned suitcase.
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RICCI This is very dark, but I would just like to go back to that age and do it over again and not make so many fucking mistakes. Honestly, I regret so much.
CYPRESS Me too. One thousand percent.
LEWIS Me too.
RICCI I’d like to go back to 1996 and be like, “All right … we had a practice run. It went OK, but it wasn’t really as great as we wanted it to be. We’re going to do this again.” People who are like, “I have no regrets.” What fucking magic life did you live?
LEWIS Where they go, “I don’t regret anything because that led up to this moment.” Really? The thing that could’ve put my dad in an early grave, I fucking regret it. Yes. I was very scary as a young teenage person.
CYPRESS Yeah. I hurt a lot of people growing up, and I wish that I didn’t. I was going through my memory box. It was my great-great-grandmother’s she brought over from Hungary. It’s huge, and it’s filled to the brim with everything from my life. I came across a note from high school. It was my first gay friend, and it broke my heart because he was like, “I want to thank you for not talking to me anymore and just cutting me off the way that you did. It made it hurt less.” I literally was crying, and I had to call him and be like, “I just came across this note, and I’m so sorry that I was that person to you.” When I think back, I think how wonderful our relationship was, but I was a shit, you know? I would definitely do so many things differently.
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LEWIS I’ve had those moments where I turned into … Because I’ve been bullied, but when I was 11 and got in a fight with a girl, I was mean [the same way] how a girl was mean to me. I was really vicious.
LYNSKEY I think people without regrets are narcissists. I think they’re lying to themselves.
RICCI Denial is the only way to get up that river.
What did you all feel when you learned that Roe v. Wade was overturned?
RICCI It’s really horrible to be told so plainly what your value is.
LEWIS I wish the two factions can talk, like, “Hey, what do you do with a bad situation, poverty and drug addiction, and rape?” You have to have an option that is salvageable or is sustainable for the survival of a person, a woman who’s living.
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CYPRESS I don’t really give a shit what your reason to have an abortion is. It’s your fucking body. I don’t really fucking care. You don’t want to be a mom, right? That’s your fucking decision. Look, we can put morals on it and say, “Well, only when you’re raped, or only if it’s …” It’s like no, dude. It’s either in or out. We’re either telling women what to do with their bodies or we let them have their own choice. I am of the mind, choice. I’m not going to judge you for making that decision.
LYNSKEY And there seems to be this general lack of compassion and empathy that’s just growing and growing. There’s so much hatred, and people are unable to look at another person’s life and go, “Oh, you know, that’s an untenable situation,” or even, “That’s a difficult situation.” There’s no grace given to anybody else. There’s no empathy. You don’t get to make decisions for somebody else. You don’t know what’s right for them.
Is there a place for TV and film in that conversation?
CYPRESS I mean, that’s what TV and film do. That’s what art is. On Yellowjackets, let’s talk about Shauna’s baby in the woods, you know? Yeah. I think we have a lot of room to speak on this subject, and I hope we do.
Did anybody have their kids on set for season one?
LYNSKEY (Points to Ricci.) We did.
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RICCI And I was pregnant. I didn’t tell anyone but these ladies that I was pregnant for six months. When we started, I was six weeks pregnant. It was difficult. There were so many times where I was like, “Ooh, when they find out I’m pregnant, and they made me sit in this smoky room all day. When they realize that they made me stand for eight hours, and I’m pregnant, and I have this horrible sciatica, and it’s 100 degrees, oh, they’re going to feel so bad.” They didn’t feel bad at all. But anyway, it was fine. In fact, it would’ve been helpful if I was playing a more emotional character because I can give a real good performance when I’m pregnant, real emo.
How would you finish the sentence, “Yellowjackets is really about …”?
CYPRESS Women. PTSD.
LYNSKEY Trauma.
CYPRESS Friendship.
RICCI Haunting, the way trauma haunts you. The way you can never escape. The way it twists people in different ways.
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LEWIS Aberrant survival tactics.
We know that these characters have done a bunch of aberrant things, as you say, including cannibalism. But do you have in your mind an idea that, “OK, she may have eaten another human being, but she would never do this“?
RICCI I know when they confront me because I’m like, “OK, she wouldn’t do that.” Misty wouldn’t drink that drink. Originally, in the script, she was drinking a Brandy Alexander, and I said, “No, Misty would drink a chocolate martini.” I have rules and stuff for her in my head, and they do conflict with the writers sometimes. I don’t think she actually is interested in men, at all. I think she does it because she’s bored, or because she thinks that’s what she’s supposed to do. Then, she’s also realized that she can have a lot of fun trying to trick them into having sex with her when they don’t want to. It’s like men will kind of know that you don’t want to have sex with them, but if they can get you to have sex with them, they won.
LEWIS It’s a power thing.
RICCI Misty’s way of doing it is through this really horrible manipulation, making him feel guilty and having sex with her while feeling guilty, which would be a terrible experience.
When you have a different perspective on your character than the writers, what do you do?
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RICCI That’s part of the thing with TV that I’ve learned now, being involved in a production but not being one of the EPs, so you aren’t a part of creating what people do. “OK, they wrote this scene. I have to play this scene. If she was in this situation, how the fuck would she be in this situation, and why would she be?” Then, you don’t have to tell other people what you come up with. They can find out about it later when you do press.
Does anybody else have a line in their mind that their character wouldn’t cross?
LYNSKEY I had one. There was something written into a script where I was going on a date with my lover, and they had me going into my daughter’s bedroom and taking her underwear, which was just not practical because I wouldn’t fit it. She’s little. But also, ew. I think there was something, apparently, somewhere, people liked the thing in the pilot where I’m masturbating in my daughter’s bedroom. I was like, “Can that just be an isolated incident? I don’t want it to be a theme.” So I just was like, “I don’t want to do that.” They were great about it.
LEWIS It comes, I think, with experience and respect, that they appreciate if you have a point of view. I have an “anything goes” stamp on me, which they all know. But I have strong ideas, especially about my trajectory in midlife. I’ve looked at Natural Born Killers recently, and I’m like, “Jesus.” Thank goodness I had a partner like Woody Harrelson, but it is so sexual. No one forced me into that. I was a young nihilist who didn’t give a fuck, and I felt comfortable with Woody, and I liked the material. But nowadays, I’m very particular. So, they had written a sex scene, and I was like, “I don’t know. I don’t know that she even gets off. I don’t know that she even can have orgasms.” That’s how deep I went. So it was more like, is she doing something to get something? At the end of the day, I just didn’t even think she fucks, sorry to be so graphic, at this juncture that you saw in season one. I think she might’ve had relationships with all of them in the wilderness. I don’t know if they’re going to write it, but that’s what I’d like to think of Natalie.
LYNSKEY That’s what I think too.
RICCI What? I never thought of that. Who would they be making out with? I guess each other.
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The finale hints that there may be additional Yellowjackets who survived into adulthood. Have actors been cast for those roles?
LEWIS Wait, Melanie, didn’t you say that on our chain, that someone we like is cast to be … (At this point there is meaningful eye contact among the four women.)
RICCI We don’t know for sure. That’s what we’ve heard was close to happening.
LYNSKEY We don’t know anything.
On season one, you were making this show under the radar. Now there’s so much fan speculation. Does that change the way you approach the work?
RICCI There’s more pressure going into season two.
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CYPRESS Have you guys also had that feeling of like, “Can I do this? Is it going to be good, the second season? Am I going to fuck this character up?”
LYNSKEY I have those fears.
RICCI Me too, but because TV is so fast, and you have so little time with the information, the process of talking about the show afterward helps you to evolve your take on your character. To understand things that were intended with the character that maybe weren’t clear originally because you get to hear the EPs talk about it. I’m going to make changes in the next season based on what I have come to realize through all this talking.
Like what?
RICCI Well, that’s a secret.
How much do you want to know about the path that your character is on?
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CYPRESS Fuck, I want to know everything. I sit there, and when I think about the show, I think, “What the fuck are they going to do with this character?” There’s so many different parts to her right now. The dog thing. She’s now a senator. There may be an old love coming back, you know? I’m like, “How are they going to do this?” I just want to know.
LYNSKEY Now you’re a full-time dog killer.
RICCI I didn’t even know that you were supposed to be the one that killed the dog.
CYPRESS What?
RICCI I thought, “Oh, well maybe somebody broke in.”
LYNSKEY That could still be, right?
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CYPRESS Wait, give me more to think about.
So you don’t go to the writers and say, “To be clear, did I kill the dog?”
CYPRESS Oh, we do. They just say, “Mmm.”
RICCI “We don’t know.”
CYPRESS But they do know.
RICCI I don’t think they’re trying to control us with no information or anything. Sometimes, they don’t want to commit to something that hasn’t been necessarily set in stone. I do find it frustrating to not know, and we’re never able to know fully. I have decided to learn how to function with knowing nothing.
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Interview edited for length and clarity.
This story first appeared in the Aug. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Shockwaves from Warner Bros.’s cancelation of Batgirl have had many fans questioning the possibility of other DC-connected projects following suit. Amid outcries from fans of Batgirl, Michael Keaton, Brendan Fraser, and even Snyderverse fans who are always eager to picket Warner Bros., Peacemaker fans started asking James Gunn whether there was any possibility that his DC work was going to suffer amid the company’s cost-cutting exercise. Ironically, considering the history that led James Gunn to work with DCEU characters, it seems that the director and his shows are the only ones who are “safe.”
What seems like a lifetime ago, James Gunn was all set to start work on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 for Disney and Marvel Studios when some old Twitter posts led to him being unceremoniously sacked. By the time Disney backtracked on their firing, Gunn was already committed to directing The Suicide Squad for Warner Bros., which is why Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has taken so long to arrive. Now, during all the chaos at Warner Bros., it appears that Gunn is not worried at all about the second season of Peacemaker getting the ax. When asked if the show was safe, Gunn simply replied:
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“Yes, guys, calm down.”
That is a relief for fans of the small sub-universe Gunn is building inside the DCEU, which along with The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, is set to include at least another unannounced project and be linked to the Amanda Waller series that is in development. At least that side of the franchise doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
Related: Peacemaker: Will More Suicide Squad Members Appear in Season 2?
Is Warner Bros. Still Planning on Rebooting The DCEU?
There have been rumors of a “soft-reboot” coming to the DCEU for a long time, and while it seems at times like Warner Bros. is heading in that direction, they have constantly denied any such intention. During San Diego Comic-Con, the entire focus of the Warner Bros. live-action DC panel was on Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Both of these movies have their small links to the wider DCEU, and once again, Warner Bros. seemed to be causing confusion by including a Justice League montage within the Shazam sequel while at the same time professing that they are not revisiting that particular DCEU set up in any way.
One thing clear from Dwayne Johnson’s appearance at SDCC is that he believes that Black Adam is setting the tone for a new DCEU, and based on everything else that is happening, he could be right. While there is no way of telling exactly where the franchise will be heading beyond The Flash in 2023, with new additional entries like Wonder Woman 3 constantly being stuck in limbo, it has been made clear that some big changes are being made in regards to the DCEU and fans will be hoping that those changes bring some kind of consistency to the franchise before it ends up crashing down around itself.