While Samantha Hanratty was filming the horrific plane crash sequence, Showtime Yellowjackets , she had to do the opposite instead of using her emotions. “I’m a very emotional person; I’m an empath,” she said. “I, as Samantha, would have been sobbing. I would have had a nervous breakdown. But Misty sees things very differently.”
In Amy In the first season of the award-nominated series, which tells the story of a high school football team lost in the wilderness) and their adult counterparts dealing with the impact of their actions today, Hanratty grim audience as the calculating lonely Misty Quigley, played by Emmy nominee Christina Ricci as an adult. But just as Misty repeatedly sabotaged her classmates, drugged her soccer coach or grimly amputated a leg, Hanratty has feelings for the curly-haired eccentric: “I just want to hug her and tell her Go get treatment.”
This 48 year old Hanratty has been performing since she was 6, but even after Pushing Daisies and Shameless , Yellowjackets are her biggest roles to date. Before booking the role, she went through multiple rounds of auditions for the series — reading to Misty and the cynical cool girl Natalie (who ended up being played by Sophie Thatcher). Hanratty had no idea she would play the same role as Ricci, another star who has worked in the industry since childhood. When Hanratty found out who she would share the role with, she fell down an internet rabbit hole. “I started looking up her pictures and looking at my own pictures,” she said. “I [put] them aside and was like, ‘What do we have in common? What don’t we have?'”
