The Cult of Simone Kessell: The ‘Yellowjackets’ Star on Lottie’s Inner Antler Queen

It’s almost midnight here in the UK. From my laptop, Simone Kessell is beaming up at me, the morning sun pouring into a boho chic room of her Sydney home.

Looking at her now, it feels appropriate that she is talking about the light that seems to emanate from Lottie, the caftan-wearing wellness guru she plays in Yellowjackets. She wanted the character to be a sort of beacon for her acolytes, Kessell says, in stark contrast to Lottie’s darker teen version, played by Courtney Eaton. “Courtney has this beautiful way of being very strong and stoic and still,” she says. “I sort of cherry-picked those moments from her performance, and then brought it into a present day version of somebody I would like to follow if I joined a cult.”

As I look at Kessell now, I can see why the extras who played her followers on the show remained spellbound after the cameras stopped rolling—she has the same charismatic radiance in real life that she does on screen, the kind that renders Lottie’s cult as almost too inviting.

Kessell is a new addition to the cast of Yellowjackets this season. Season 1, which was something of a surprise hit when it first aired on Showtime last year, follows a high school girls soccer team in the 1990s, whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness on route to nationals. Winter is approaching, and the survivors struggle to stay alive. As the mystery of their continued survival unfolds, we flit between flash forwards to the present day, where the same women are still grappling with the repressed trauma of their time in the woods.

Lottie soon becomes a spiritual figure in the group, making eerily accurate predictions and, it seems, communing directly with a dark supernatural presence that lurks with them. By the season finale, she has donned the now-infamous Antler Queen crown, first teased in the pilot, and led the girls in a shroom-induced ritualistic sacrifice to the wilderness.

In Season 2, we meet the adult version of Lottie. After being institutionalized for years, she is now running what she herself describes as an “intentional community.” They keep bees, sell honey at the market, share jobs around the commune—oh, and, on occasion, they put on the creepy animal masks the girls wore in the ’90s and re-enact a pagan-esque ceremony in the woods.

When Kessell got the role, she began prepping by imagining the reality of this cult. What would it be like? And what kind of person could really inspire so many people to follow her? “I did a lot of research on acolytes and the followers—the devotees, and why they just give up everything to join these communities,” she says. While adult Lottie’s cult is based around “love and light and spiritual healing and faith,” as Kessell puts it, there is a darkness bubbling away beneath the surface. “She has all of these demons. There’s trauma. There’s PTSD, that she’s just suppressed because she has to be the face of this community. And so as the season progresses, they start to bubble to the surface, and she starts to drown in them.”

When Season 2 begins, however, Lottie is keeping those demons at bay. “The beauty of who Lottie is, is just a mask, because if we peel it back what’s underneath is somebody who is incredibly traumatized,” Kessell explains. A bit part of that mask comes in the form of Lottie’s mesmerizing silk caftans. “I had a vision of how I wanted to play her,” she says of Adult Lottie’s striking look. While her followers all wear the same shade, Lottie is all deep oranges and golds against this sea of purple. “I was like, ‘No, I’m not wearing purple.’ You don’t want to be on the same level. It’s a status thing.”

Kessell collaborated with the show’s costume designer, Amy Parris, to bring this version of Lottie as new-age spiritual goddess to life. “[Parris] came in with his sheets and sheets of fabric, and I’d go in there and drape all these fabrics around me and pull my hair out,” she says, dramatically pulling her hair into her face and transforming into Lottie before my eyes.

Lottie is what many critics would consider a career-defining role for Kessell—and it has come after three decades of steady work in the industry. The New Zealand native landed her first professional job at the age of 12, starring in a commercial, and worked in New Zealand as a teen, before moving to Australia; there, higher profile projects were beckoning. Then, she headed to Los Angeles, where she landed small roles in CSI, Criminal Minds, and the movie Frost/Nixon. Eventually, the roles got bigger: a recurring role in the Australian comedy Wonderland; a starring role in motorcycle drama 1%; and another in ABC’s refugee drama The Crossing.

In 2022, Kessell hit the Hollywood jackpot—a role in a Star Wars spin-off. In Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Ewan McGregor-led prequel series to the original films, she played Breha Organa, the adoptive mother of a young Princess Leia. The actress brought a maternal warmth and wry intelligence to the role that instantly endeared her to fans. “It’s an incredible fan base,” she says of Star Wars lovers. “[It’s] like a religion. I have nothing but respect for all the Star Wars fans out there. They’ve been lovely.”

Luckily, Star Wars mania prepared her for what was to come with Yellowjackets. “I’m always blown away by such committed fans of a show,” Kessell says, adding that it’s “a gift, coming into a show that already had such a huge fan base.”

“But I am pretty overwhelmed by it,” she notes, mentioning that she found her way to the Yellowjackets subreddit a few weeks ago—“I will never do that again!” She does, however, love the fanvids pairing her character with Adult Nat (played by Juliette Lewis). “[The fans are] obsessed with Lottie and Nat—hashtag-LottieNat and everything,” she says, before teasing, “I don’t want to break their hearts, but it takes a turn.”

There is an odd symmetry between the cast of Yellowjackets and their onscreen counterparts. In Season 2, the adult characters eventually reunite at Lottie’s compound, bonding over their shared trauma of their time in the wilderness back in the ’90s. Ironically, the actors playing them also have a shared bond that dates back to roughly the same time. Like Kessell, most of the other adult women in the show began their acting careers as teenagers, around the same time. “The only difference is that I know of their work. They don’t know mine,” she laughs. “Because, you know, I’ve been doing theater in New Zealand—Melanie [Lynskey, who plays Adult Shauna] did [know me], obviously, because we both come from New Zealand.”

The group comes from all over the world—culturally, they are, as Kessell jokingly calls them, the “United Colors of Benetton girls.” “We’re all just completely different, but we all get on and there’s such respect there,” she says. And it comes, more than anything, from their shared experiences. “We’ve all been working. And beautiful Lauren [Ambrose, who plays Adult Van] said, ‘This is such a celebration of us all being together as survivors,’ and we’re like, ‘Yeah, Yellowjackets, survivors, yeah,’ and she’s like, ‘No. Survivors of the industry.’

“And it is so true,” she goes on. “The sacrifices, the stories, all the times that we’ve lived through, the MeToos—all this stuff that was just part of our industry growing up, is so, so vastly different to the present and to the young actors on our show, what they’re all going through. That is really interesting. And we get an opportunity to kind of drop that through our characters as well.”

In Episode 7, called simply “Burial,” the trauma that has so long been hidden within Lottie finally comes roaring to the surface. The group of other adult survivors has recently congregated at her compound. Ultimately, it’s Lottie’s strange sisterhood of friends from the past that not only brings this darkness back, but also helps her get through it—at least for now.

Throughout the season, Lottie has been speaking to a therapist. “Them being here—I feel it in my body,” Lottie tells her therapist in Episode 7. “It could be that this reunion strikes a primal chord with you because in the past, when you were with these other women, you were free,” her therapist replies. “We hurt each other. People died,” a fearful Lottie argues. The therapist then retorts, to Lottie’s confusion, “Tell me, is there anything of value in this life that doesn’t come with risk, or loss, or consequence?” Suddenly, after that, the therapist is gone. In her place: the Antler Queen. “Does a hunt that has no violence feed anyone?” this new figure asks. Lottie is terrified.

“This woman is unhinged and broken and clearly needs some kind of medication other than oils and some crystals,” says Kessell, of this jarring moment. “And I think it’s the major turning point of the character arc for Lottie, because when she sees the Queen and realizes that she hasn’t been in therapy, that it’s all been in her head, it means that the past is here. It’s in all of us.”

The season is building toward a collision of the past and present—and it’s now all too clear that the horrors of the past will soon spill out into the present-day timeline too.

Following her imagined therapy session, the horrified Lottie finds her group of friends and demands that they leave—if they brought the wilderness back with them, nothing good can come from them staying together. And yet, when the group asks Lottie to join them instead, she can’t help but give in. “Seeing them all smiling up at her, she’s like, ‘I want that so much. I want that family again for a moment,’” Kessell says. “She drops her guard and she pushes all that aside.” As Florence + the Machine’s “Free” plays, the girls take shots, laugh and dance. It’s a joyous moment of ecstatic catharsis and freedom for all of them.

But this is, of course, Yellowjackets, and moments of lightness are rarely simple and never pure. As the adults dance euphorically around the fire, we see, interspersed, a flashback to their time in the woods. The younger Shauna has just lost her baby. She has a growing rage within her, and it has no outlet. Lottie, the spiritual leader of the group, steps forward. “Shauna, I know there’s a lot of pain right now, but let it out,” Teen Lottie says, holding her hands behind her back. “Shauna, we need you.” Lottie, it seems, is offering herself up as a sacrifice for the greater good of the group. In one of the darkest moments of the show yet, Shauna then beats Lottie to a pulp.

The horrifying scene was, for Kessell, a strange reminder of Lottie’s generosity. “When I was reading it, I was like, ‘That’s incredible. What a gift. What a generous gift,’” she recalls. “As crazy as that is. And you can kind of understand it, because as much as it was releasing Shauna’s pain, it was making Lottie feel something. They all just want to feel something that’s tangible, that’s real, that’s vibrant, that’s alive.”

Did it affect the way that present-day Lottie treats present-day Shona? “Perhaps a tinge,” says Kessell, a knowing twinkle in her eye. “I know if somebody had beaten me black and blue that I would hold some kind of grudge—as ‘namaste’ as one can be,” she offers cryptically. Perhaps that’s a good hint for the remaining two episodes of the season, I suggest. “That’s very true,” she says.

As for Lottie’s future, Kessell carefully suggests that, in Season 3, she probably won’t be back at her commune. But Lottie’s innate cult leadership skills won’t be going anywhere. “I do know that I see Lottie still searching for the light and still trying to inspire and help people,” she says. “She has a gift and she has a vision. She has a way of connecting. That’s intrinsically in her.”