Yellowjackets Sophie Nelisse Accidently Took Jackie's Ear Home With Her
This article contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets."
Even if you've never watched a single second of Showtime's hit series "Yellowjackets," you probably know that the show deals with a high school girls' soccer team stranded in the wilderness and a whole lot of cannibalism. Maybe it's because I'm a Sicko™ who watched "Cannibal Holocaust" a little too young, but "Yellowjackets" has currently featured a pretty acceptable amount of cannibalism. I mean, if you consider anything more than "one" to be an acceptable number. Season 2 kicked off with the show's first foray into eating human flesh, when pregnant teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) ate the frozen ear off of the corpse of her best friend, Jackie (Ella Purnell), who froze to death in the season 1 finale.
The moment was shocking, disgusting, and weirdly poetic, as Shauna's love for her best friend seemed to extend to her desire to make Jackie a part of her. The show's creative team has already spoken about how her act of eating the ear was hotly debated in the writer's room, with co-creator Bart Nickerson saying: "And then the other thing is — and I usually don't want to do this, talk about what almost was — but I just think it's hilarious the amount of time that we spent both in breaking writing and then in editing, deciding how much of the ear — like, should it go in the mouth, should it not go in the mouth? Should there be a chew?"
No one in the "Yellowjackets" cast interacts with Jackie's ear other than Shauna, which is probably why no one noticed when Sophie Nélisse accidentally took it home with her as an unintentional keepsake. Not the one she ate, of course.
'What is this weird, squishy thing?'
During a recent interview with Esquire, Sophie Nélisse admitted that she absentmindedly put the ear in her pocket after shooting one day, and didn't find it until months later. "I was going through my pocket and I was like, 'What is this weird squishy thing ... Oh my god, it's the ear,'" she said. The ear in question was made out of silicone, which is fortunate considering much of the edible flesh in "Yellowjackets" is made out of candy.
"You'll see eventually in the show there's other things that we eat that are actually made out of gummy bear," she told Esquire. "They're actually so tasty, but they look so real and gooey and gross that our brains can't really disassociate and step back away from it. It feels disgusting eating it—even though it's actually quite yummy. It's literally a giant gummy bear." Co-star Samantha Hanratty, who plays Misty Quigley, is a proud vegan and has confirmed that some of what she's provided is made of Beyond Meat or vegan-friendly gummies.
As for the ear? Nélisse said she keeps it hidden away in her room. " It'd be a bit of a red flag if someone came into my room and there's this whole little ear on my countertop. So, it's hidden away in a little souvenir box." Aw, it's just like the heart box from "Snow White." How sweet!