Yellowjackets isn’t a show you watch. It’s a show you consume. The premise: In 1996, a high school girls’ soccer team’s plane crashes in the woods on the way to nationals, thus forcing them to live off the land and make, er, questionable nutritional choices. In the current day, the surviving few must reckon with their collective past.
The show’s gruesome, anticipation-packed plot is only half as compelling as the characters themselves. That goes especially for Natalie, played by Sophie Thatcher, whom I was drawn to from the very first episode because of the painfully relatable grouchy exterior she uses to mask her vulnerability. Most of all, though, I noticed her because—quite frankly—her hair was really fucking cool.
That was back in 2021, when Thatcher was an ultimately unknown entity. In the years since, she’s become somewhat of a horror genre darling—in the past six months alone, she led two back-to-back A24 hits, Heretic and Companion—and has yet to stray from the hyper-cool-girl shaggy haircut that made her an instant standout.
All the while, she remains a fan favorite on Yellowjackets, the third season of which airs on February 14. Below, we revisit our 2021 interview with Thatcher about the show’s first season, how that instantly iconic hair came to be, and the products she used to heal her hair from all that bleach.
The first thing I tell Sophie Thatcher when I get her on the phone is that I think her hair is really cool. From there, I barely even need to ask any questions. “I’ve been through everything with my hair,” she says of her mullet-shag hybrid (a shaglet, if you will), which she sticks to on- and off-camera. She’s had similar haircuts since she was a teenager and hasn’t looked back since. “I would always get my hair cut at this place called Shizen in Williamsburg,” she explains. “It has gone through many stages, from full-out mullet to weird bowl-cuts with long pieces on the side.”
Though her cut has remained ultimately the same for several years now, Thatcher can’t resist hair dye, which is actually the reason 1996 Natalie’s hair is bleach-blonde as opposed to her older counterpart (played by Juliette Lewis), who has dark brown hair. “When we first shot the pilot, I just happened to have a bleach-blonde shag, and [the show’s crew] thought it worked [for the character],” Thatcher recalls.
Right after filming the Yellowjackets pilot for Showtime, however, Thatcher shot The Book of Boba Fett, a Star Wars series for Disney+ that required her to dye her hair brown. Not long after, Yellowjackets was picked up for a full season, and the show’s hair department scrambled to get young Nat’s signature platinum blonde back. “They tried to bleach it, but my hair was already in bad condition. And it was already a super shag, so it wasn’t really thick enough to bleach.”
The damage from that was irreparable, so Thatcher had to wear extensions briefly until eventually switching to a wig for her hair’s sake. As she explains, in the pilot, that hair is all hers; in the following couple of episodes, you’re looking at Tatcher’s real hair with some extensions for continuity. She can’t even recall at what point they switched to the wig, but she wears it for the majority of the first and only season (you can tell because, as she jokes, her character is stranded in the woods for months with “this perfect white-blonde hair with no roots”).
You’d think Nat’s seemingly effortless hair look would, in reality, require immense amounts of hairstyling, as TV hair often does. Thatcher explains, however, that before she started wearing the wig, the Sophie-to-Nat process wasn’t all that complicated.
“My hair is naturally pretty straight, so they put a curling iron to it because Juliette’s hair has a nice wave to it,” she says. The pièce de résistance to creating that eternally cool, roughed-up quality, Thatcher reveals, was Oribe Dry Texturizing Spray (the on-set hairstylist gave her a bottle, and she hasn’t stopped using it off-camera).
Obviously, Thatcher and the show’s producers are fully aware that young Nat’s hair is way too polished for the brutal forest environment in which the crux of the show takes place. They’re “working on that” for when season two rolls around—hopefully, sooner than later. “There was a little bit of a disconnection. I think for the next season, we’re going to rough it up more,” Thatcher teases.
Currently, in real life, Thatcher’s working with a brown-black color and a full-blown mullet that ends around the nape of her neck; that length is no doubt the result of all that bleaching she mentioned earlier. “My hair was so, so damaged,” she recalls. “So many pieces in the back were falling out.” She’s currently relying on “lots and lots and lots of Olaplex” to revive her hair’s health between seasons—specifically, the No. 3 Hair Perfector.
She credits Yellowjacket‘s hair team with putting her on to silk bonnets, too, which she now sleeps in every single night. “I tend to move around a lot in my sleep; I would wake up with the worst rat’s nest,” she laughs. “[The bonnet’s] not glamorous at all but helps.”
After wrapping the show’s first season, Thatcher also had to amp up her skincare routine because working outside in the forest for long hours gave her “the worst acne of my life.” (In fact, she says all of the actors who play younger counterparts experienced way more acne than usual at the time.) She washes her face daily with CeraVe’s Foaming Facial Cleanser, then moisturizes—but not before applying her be-all, end-all acne treatment. “I started using the Mario Badescu Drying Lotion… that’s actually helped the most.”
As far as makeup goes, Thatcher doesn’t wear too much these days because she’s wearing masks so frequently—but when she’s hitting the town, she reaches for tried-and-true drugstore staples. “I’ll put CoverGirl TruBlend Undercover Concealer under my eyes and maybe on my acne, then I’ll do a cat-eye,” she explains. “I’ve been doing a winged cat-eye since I was 14, whenever I go out. Recently, I’ve been exploring the look where the eyeliner goes down at the bridge of your nose; I like the way it brings my eyes down and kind of widens them.”
To my surprise, Thatcher prefers nude lipsticks to bold colors — her favorite formula is Maybelline New York’s SuperStay Ink Crayon. “That’s kind of it.”
Clearly, Thatcher and young Natalie have just as much in common as they don’t. While they share an affinity for the alternative look, Thatcher can only continue to refine it. Nat, on the other hand… “[As the girls spend] more time in the wilderness, we’re just going to keep looking worse and worse,” Thatcher laughs.
I never thought I’d hear an actor say their goal was to look worse, but if that doesn’t sum up Yellowjackets to a tee, I don’t know what does.
