Yellowjackets Season 2 Had One BTS Moment That Left Ella Purnell Uneasy

This story contains spoilers for the Showtime series "Yellowjackets."

Watching your own acting work can be an out of body experience. You see someone who looks exactly like you in every way, but it's not really you. Sometimes, this can be only slightly surreal, but other times, it can be truly unsettling. The latter is what "Yellowjackets" star Ella Purnell experienced during the filming of the show's second season.

After her character Jackie tragically froze to death following an argument with her best friend Shauna, her frozen corpse was placed on a funeral pyre. As she was burned, the starving kids became overcome with hunger and found themselves driven to do the unthinkable: cannibalize their friend's corpse.

With her death at the end of Season 1, Purnell only had a handful of scenes in Season 2 as a ghost haunting her former best friend, but production still sent Purnell scripts to keep her abreast of what happened on the show while she was filming her breakthrough role in Amazon Prime's "Fallout." In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she shared the surreal out of body experience that happened as the rest of the crew went about filming the second season of the show:

"I was actually really slow at reading the script. They would send me the scripts for Season 2, even though I wasn't necessarily in it. I was filming 'Fallout,' and I was very overwhelmed, and so I was being really slow with reading them. And then, out of nowhere, I got all of these texts and selfies from the 'Yellowjackets' cast with my charred corpse. And, in a weird way, it really did look like me, even though you can't really see any details. It was just her charred body, but it's my body. So it was mostly funny, but it was also a little bit disconcerting and a little odd."

From the very beginning, Purnell knew her character was doomed to die. "I knew with my first audition," she explained. "I was pretty cautious about TV and so, at the time, that seemed really appealing. And then when we started filming, I didn't want to die."

As Purnell bonded with the rest of her "Yellowjackets" co-stars, she went to the series' writers and begged them to find a way to give Jackie a little more time with her friends. "So they thought about it," she said. "And then they called me and were like, 'She's got to go. We tried. We did our best.'"

While Purnell was unable to convince the writers' room to let Jackie cheat death, her traumatic end — and eventual consumption — has proved for many to be its most shocking moment in a show filled with many brutal twists and turns. It was tough to be on the outside of the show while it blew up, but Purnell doesn't have any regrets. "We really formed such a close bond, partially because of the nature of the very intense scenes that we did," she said. "So we got really, really close, and it was hard [to not be there]. I definitely missed them and I got serious FOMO."

Luckily, Jackie's ghost came to haunt the girls, which gave Purnell the opportunity to leave the wastelands of "Fallout" for a day to return to frigid Vancouver and reunite with her Yellowjackets teammates. This all-too-brief reunion helped "scratched the itch" for Purnell and gave her the closure to say goodbye to "Yellowjackets" and commit fully to "Fallout," which itself became a phenomenon when it premiered in 2024.

So Jackie may be gone, but she'll never be forgotten, at least by her friends who know exactly what she tastes like.