Steven Krueger Talks Surviving In The Wilderness In New Showtime Drama Yellowjackets
Showtime’s new drama Yellowjackets follows a dual story set in 1996 and 2021 focused on a group of talented high school girls soccer players. In 1996, their plane crash lands in the Ontario wilderness on their way to nationals and they go from a complicated and thriving team into cannibalistic clans. Twenty five years later, their adult counterparts struggle with the truth of what happened back then. I spoke with Steven Krueger on The Fan Club, who stars as young assistant soccer coach Ben Scott, about his role and what it was like diving into this dark, wilderness narrative.
What first got Krueger interested in Yellowjackets was the creative team behind it, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, who he also worked on The CW show The Originals with. “I really love the way that they write. I think that they write scripts the way that a lot of people write novels,” Krueger told me on The Fan Club. “[There’s] just so much rich and intricate detail and they really create this very unique world so as soon as I saw their names on the script I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be good,’ and then sure enough, I read it, and it was one of the best pilot scripts I had read in in probably my entire career honestly. It was just so captivating so gripping from from the very first few pages. They just have such warped minds, to be honest, I mean that, in the best way possible, that I knew they were going to take us on a on an incredible ride.”
Krueger takes us inside his role as assistant coach Ben Scott. “When they crashed he's actually the only adult that survives the plane crash, so he finds himself in this scenario where he's kind of trapped out here in the wilderness with a bunch of teenage girls and he has to be the authority figure. I think a lot of them are kind of looking to Ben Scott for answers in those first few episodes. The problem, of course, is that he has suffered this very traumatic injury,” he said. “So he's dealing with that and feels fairly helpless, you know, like he shouldn't be the one that they're looking to for answers because he just doesn't have any. [He] really can't focus on anything besides this amputated leg that he's just suffered." And then, of course, they sprinkle in the fun dynamic of the fact that he's the hot teacher and the girls have crushes and that starts to play out as we get into kind of the middle of the season in the later later in the season. He has to kind of fend off some of those crushes for a number of different reasons.”
He wanted to make sure to tackle his character’s traumatic injury authentically. “I did quite a bit of research going into it just because I wanted to make sure that it wasn't a cliche. I wanted to make sure that it wasn't me just kind of screaming and and you know crawling around, and so I did research about both the physical effects and the psychological and emotional effects that somebody goes through when they suffer an amputation like that. I found a ton of useful information and I think I did a good job of incorporating a lot of that into the work that I did throughout the season,” said Krueger. “Initially, they made it very easy, because the situation that they put us in it felt very authentic. It felt very real. It didn't feel like we were pretending. The prosthetic that they created for that initial scene when my leg gets smushed and stretched out was so good and just so nauseating to look at that I don't feel like I had to do a whole lot of work as far as acting goes. They just kind of threw us right in there and the physical stuff… I went through the same process that I think Ben Scott as a character probably went through where I didn't quite know what to do at the beginning, which is great because Ben Scott didn't either when this injury happened, and he kind of figured this out as the show goes on. He figures out how to live with this injury… as he starts to heal he figures out how to move around a little bit better, how to not be so reliant on other people to take care of him.”
Taking on a wilderness scenario wasn’t easy… in fact, sometimes the cast hated it. “We hated it at times. They didn't do us any favors by building [the forest in] a nice cushy soundstage with air conditioning or anything like that. They found a forest and they dropped us off in it. That was it,” he said. “So every day it was like we were coming in, and we were putting on the same crusty, dirty, smelly clothes were rolling around in the dirt. Oh my God, was it hot! There were mosquitoes everywhere. We were really in it. We were in the shit for weeks and weeks and weeks. At the end of the day, I think, reflecting back, it was so necessary. It wouldn't have had the same effect on us if they had built us a fake forest. It was mentally draining, it was physically draining, and I think that all of that kind of comes through in our performances, and I think that the cast did an incredible job of allowing all of that to affect them.”
When it comes to what he hopes people take away from Yellowjackets, Krueger said to “expect the unexpected.” “People have it in their heads that this show is one thing and I can tell you that it's not, so i'm very curious to see what the reaction is. It's so different and it's so unexpected and it's so unique,” he shared. “I think that people are really going to be blown away when they actually see where this show goes and all the different genres that it incorporates. It's not something that you can pigeonhole.”
Yellowjackets airs Sundays at 10pm EST on Showtime.
