Welcome to Pour One Out! In this series, IndieWire celebrates some of our favorite characters on TV that have come to the end of their run this season, with the stars that played them.
[Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Yellowjackets.”]
For Steven Krueger, “Yellowjackets” was “kind of a mindfuck.” The actor spent three seasons playing TV’s unluckiest soccer coach before a bout of sudden-death overtime forced Coach Ben to hang up his crutches in Season 3. Speaking with IndieWire amid a heated Emmys race, Krueger reflected on his bizarre experience making the show — a brain-twisting challenge he still considers a personal best.
“Everybody asks me all the time, ‘Did you get to keep your head?’ That really is the universal first thing that everybody wants to know,” said Krueger. “The answer, of course, is no, I did not — nor would I want to.”
“The first time I saw it, my very first instinct was, ‘This is an amazing piece of artistry. How cool. I can’t believe they pulled this off. It looks exactly like me,’” he continued. “Then, after about five seconds, it was like, ‘Actually, I don’t love this. I really feel like I’m holding my own head. Somebody please, please take this away from me.’”
Besides Ben’s decapitation, Krueger endured more internal conflict watching his tortured performance. From the emergency leg amputation that started it all to a rigged trial that finally sealed Ben’s fate, it’s an astounding role for the actor that tested both his physical and mental limits. Still, performers like athletes can be a “self-sabotaging group.”
“Our work can be incredible, and at the end of the day, we’re just like, ‘Ah, that one tiny little moment! Why did my eye flicker like that?’” Krueger lamented. “In the end though, I was just so impressed with how every element came together. I always try to focus my attention on screen to the things that are going on besides me, and that cast and crew is just out of this world.”
There’s no question “Yellowjackets” is a team effort. Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Showtime’s premier cannibalism dramedy is still looking to break in its trophy case. With 10 nominations from the Television Academy so far, including Outstanding Drama Series for Seasons 1 and 2, the horror series has marked a glorious renaissance for some of its biggest stars. (See recent IndieWire interviews with Christina Ricci and Melanie Lynskey.) It also offered an unprecedented career-high for its younger cast and its first-time showrunners.
“It’s been one of the great pleasures of my career, watching Ashley and Bart come into their own,” said Krueger of his longtime friends, who are married. “This is a hard show to run when you have no [showrunner] experience. There are so many characters. The world is huge. And they’ve handled it all with such grace and elegance. It really blows my mind.”
For Season 3, Krueger grew a beard and lost a significant amount of weight. He’s been burrowing deep inside the desperate mind of a man trapped in the wilderness with a pack of feral teen girls for years. But seeing Ben’s death on the horizon meant amping up the realism for Krueger’s acting process. It was the end of a memorable arc that’s fascinated fans since day one. It also gave Krueger the payoff he wanted from his grueling prep and planning. Foresight was key to a character so “beautiful and tragic.”
“The most difficult part of this season was navigating the ups and downs of the psychology, truly. I didn’t want it to be one straight line. I wanted there to be peaks and valleys,” Krueger said. “I wanted there to be details in the performance that made people ask, ‘Wait, is he changing his mind? Is he losing it? Is he going crazy? Does he love these girls? Does he hate these girls?’ Finding those nooks and crannies was the most challenging part, but it was also the most fun and the most rewarding.”
Fellow showrunner Jonathan Lisco signed on at the outset of “Yellowjackets,” bringing his work on “Halt and Catch Fire” and “Animal Kingdom” to an eventual triumvirate of creative leads. Years earlier, around the same time Krueger started appearing on screen, Lyle and Nickerson broke into the industry as screenwriters by splitting a single salary on “The Originals.” Krueger remembers being “pissed off” when he learned his favorite writers were leaving The CW. Despite the couple assuring Krueger they would work together again eventually, he didn’t believe that day would come.
“That’s what everybody says when they part ways in this business,” explained the future Coach Ben Scott — who coincidentally also met his fiancé, actress Candice King, while shooting the supernatural series. “Then, sure enough, a handful of years later, this script for the pilot of ‘Yellowjackets’ dropped in my inbox. To this day, it is the best pilot script I have ever read.”
Krueger attributes the show’s success to Lyle and Nickerson’s originality. Relentlessly true to itself, the stomach-churning show oozes with camp and specificity — but rarely if ever lets that mess up its suspense-driven endgame. Many actors have compared Lyle and Nickerson to novelists, and Krueger said they gave him months to prepare for Ben’s death in Season 3.
“That’s to their credit,” he said. “Not everyone would do that.”
Battling a TV landscape bloated with adaptations and remakes, Krueger is routinely forced to tell fans that, “No, ‘Yellowjackets’ is not based on a true story.” That sense of urgent authenticity feeds the show’s obsessive quality — something Krueger thinks “Yellowjackets” has perfected through its unique balance of plot driven and character driven storytelling. Asked about the state of puzzle box TV (think “Lost” or “Severance”), Krueger explained how the right combination of emotion, mystery, and comedy can make a television arc addictive. He looks back on that hilarious bear spray scene with actress Alexa Barajas, another Season 3 “Yellowjackets” casualty (also known as Mari/Pit Girl) fondly.
“You’re tuning in every week to figure out what happens next in the story. ‘How do these girls get home? How do they become the adults that they are today?’” said Krueger. “At the same time, over the course of the last three seasons, we’ve really dug into the emotion of it. As much as anything, people are watching this show because they’re fascinated by these human beings.”
Digging into the script, Krueger and his acting teacher Gregory Berger never said a word of dialogue. Instead, they talked through the logic and heart of the scenes, paying keen attention to how Ben’s feelings would tactically manifest in Krueger’s dramatic visual transformation.
“There was just that story in my head that I was telling myself, about what Ben was going through,” he said. “Then, I kind of just let the rest do it for me.”
By the time filming on “Yellowjackets” Season 3 began, the actor couldn’t recognize himself in the mirror. Moving off the wintery soundstage used in Season 2, the cast returned to the wilderness where Krueger luxuriated in another change: his beard.
“Because we were doing some flashback scenes, there was a chunk of episodes in the middle where I had to wear a fake beard,” he said. “I’d never done it before, and it is not a pleasant experience.” He continued, “That is not to say anything in terms of the makeup team that was helping me with it. They’re brilliant. But I’m a little dumbfounded that here we are in 2025 — it was 2023 or whatever at the time — and they haven’t figured out better technology for applying a fake beard to a person’s face. It’s just glue. They just glue pieces on to the point where you can’t move your face, which I’ve been told is an important part of acting.”
Family and friends agreed Krueger’s real beard in Season 3 eventually overstayed its welcome, but that was just the start of a steady incline in realism underpinning Ben’s excruciating last days. Before Season 1 began, Krueger took set his character’s deterioration up for dramatic success. In 2013, Bradley Cooper spent months bulking up to convincingly play a U.S. soldier in “American Sniper.” On his road to the Oscars, the eventual Best Actor nominee explained how his commanding new size helped him take charge of the role.
“Mine was the exact inverse of that,” said Krueger, stressing that his diet never put him in real danger. “There may have been a time earlier in this story where, even with only one leg, Ben felt like he could overpower these girls if things came to that point. But this season, that was not the case.”
He continued, “The way you appear physically has an important impact on how you view the world. Not just how other people view you, but how you take in other people.”
As essential for “Yellowjackets” audiences as it was for the actor, Krueger’s “Mad Max” makeover helped sell viewers on the idea that an adult plane crash survivor had become less powerful than the high schoolers he was chaperoning. That dynamic snaps into focus during Ben’s trial in Season 3, Episode 6, titled “Thanksgiving (Canada).” Breaking the mold for Krueger’s sendoff, the chilling installment is slow-moving and set in a single location.
“I was actually nervous when I read that script, wondering how it was going to work and how it was going to play,” said Krueger. “Anytime you have basically an entire episode set in one set piece, and you’ve got 30 pages or so of dialogue that are all in that same set piece with very little movement, you run the risk of things getting boring really quickly.”
Director Pete Chatmon saved the episode from feeling like a cannibalistic “Women Talking” with a slew of clever camera tricks also worth considering in the spirit of the Emmys. But for Krueger’s part, saying goodbye to Ben and the rest of his “Yellowjackets” cast meant staying in the moment and relishing in what little time they had left.
“It was honestly so nice to have every single one of the other actors just sitting there staring me in the face,” said Krueger. “They’re all so talented and generous as actors. When the camera was not on them, it was just on me, and they gave me everything that they had. It didn’t take more than an instant to look each one of them in the eyes and feel wells of emotions coming up — just across the emotional spectrum.”
In Season 1, Episode 2, “F Sharp,” Ben lost his leg to a fire axe and a 16-year-old with wilderness survival training. Misty Quigley and Coach Ben were an especially beloved pair on the show, and Krueger says he and co-star Samantha Hanratty have remarkably similar personalities that’s made them thick as thieves in real life. So, why did it have to be alt-girl/midfielder Nat, played by actress Sophie Thatcher, who executed Krueger’s character at the end? The characters were kindred spirits, certainly.
“But ironically enough, Sophie and I are incredibly different human beings. We have very little in common, and yet from the first time we met, there was just a connection there,” he said. “Having that level of trust in another actor made it very easy to show up to set — especially in that final scene when she kind of does the deed. Just to know that you’re taken care of there and it’s reciprocal, that’s a good feeling as an actor. You cannot put a price on that.”
Like most actors, Krueger tends to feel “burnt out” as takes wear on. That wasn’t the case on his last episode. Asked directly about Ben’s crimes, purposefully left open to interpretation, Krueger confirmed: Yes, he really thinks it was Ben who burned down the cabin. The actor filmed several scenes at the end of Season 2 that made the plot point more explicit, but ultimately cutting those beats and obscuring Ben’s guilt made the story stronger.
“I’m glad that Ben wasn’t there by the end,” Krueger said. “If he was still there, he would certainly be on the hunt right now. He would be running away from these girls as they’re on the verge of being rescued because they know he won’t go along with whatever excuse they’re about to come up with for everything that has happened out there.”
Forcing the Yellowjackets to confront who they are was the point of Ben’s destruction, and in that sense, Shauna Shipman was his best student. Delivering the final metaphoric blow to her coach’s memory, Shauna rounded out Season 3 suggesting the months of starvation and murder had been “fun.” Sophie Nélisse and Krueger have been close friends throughout the show, but the man formerly known as Coach Ben admits he had never seen the actress like that before.
“She, Courtney Eaton, and I have been really close friends since the beginning of this, and Sophie is such a kind and gentle soul of a person that seeing her in the beginning of this season — being as big of a bitch as she was, but also being able to really pull that off — I was like, ‘Who is this person?’”
Noting that Nélisse can shoot daggers from her eyes just like Lynskey, Krueger was grateful the time-jump format allowed both the younger and older casts time to recoup between the darkest episodes. Having been force fed, turned into a CGI bridge, and made to hide one leg behind his back hours on end, the actor is also hoping they might reunite him with “Yellowjackets” again.
“Who knows? If we’ve learned anything on this show, it’s that these characters may never be gone fully,” Krueger said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Coach Ben sneaks his way in there in a flashback or a ghosty type of thing. Maybe with Jackie, hand in hand.”
“Yellowjackets” Season 3 is now streaming on Paramount+.
