Why “Yellow Jackets” Deserves Melanie Linsky’s Emmy Nomination

You could be wrong by far yellow jacketsShauna Sadek (Melanie Linsky) as a woman born to go unnoticed. As a teenager, played by Sophie Nellis, she was the cutest, literate best friend of golden girl Jack (Ella Purnell); Today, she is a tired suburban housewife who spends her days cleaning up stains from underwear and tending to plants in the garden.

But Linsky, who won the Critics’ Choice Award for her role in the Showtime drama in March, makes it impossible to ignore Shauna. Shauna can feel sad, her face flushed like the lips of a waterfall when no one is around. But her excitement should not be confused with blindness or meekness. Underneath her smooth exterior is a sharp, dazzling steel core that Linsky can release by tilting her head or squinting slightly. And anyone who examines him, from the charming reporter in his lobby to his own impetuous teenage daughter, quickly discovers he’s not afraid to take that steel and draw blood. (Literally in the case of at least one suspicious imaginary man and one very unlucky rabbit.)

As the season progresses, Linsky Shauna reveals even more layers. The novel reveals his reckless tendency, which in turn gives him a chance to unleash his inner teenager, who smiles at his encounter in cheap bottles of illegal parking alcohol like never before as a college student. The blackmail conspiracy that binds him to his countrymen allows Linsky to play with despair and panic, but also, in moments like Shauna’s heartbreak with Taisa (Town Cypress) improvised in her sleep, painfully soft.

Shauna isn’t a loose cannon like Natalie (Juliet Lewis) or a tracker like Misty (Christina Ritchie), but Linsky’s performance is unpredictable in her subtle ways. He laughs at awkward moments like during the awkward lunch “I don’t even like my daughter.” She feels Shauna’s trauma as she scales back her reaction: when she confides to Natalie that “sometimes I look at the world around me and like all the light has gone out,” her tone remains steady, but her voice rises. Very lightly. Nearly three decades into Linsky’s career, there’s hardly any news that he’s a versatile actor who can move between sweet and spicy, hilarious and heartbreaking at first glance. Inside yellow jacketsLinsky plays all of these notes, and then some of them, in an emotional symphony.

“Bad things happen in life. I’m fine,” argues Shauna as she worries about a plane crash that took her life off the rails, but she doesn’t lie to anyone. seems stunned by the world, throughout the season her arc is a woman slowly coming back to life, learning not only the darkness she locked in her vault after returning from the wild, but also the joy and the warmth and the curiosity: it doesn’t matter. where Shauna’s Post -The trip takes place, Linsky ensures it will never go unnoticed.

The story first appeared in a separate June issue of The Hollywood Reporter. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.