A casual conversation with Courtney Eaton begins the way all the best ones do—by exchanging reality television recommendations (she’s a Below Deck girl) and nattering away about mutual Formula One addictions, recapping the race weekend that’s just passed. Within the first few minutes of meeting, Courtney Eaton shows me who she is when she’s not playing a cannibal on television. Bubbly, personable, sweet: on the surface, the complete counterpart to Charlotte “Lottie” Matthews, the Yellowjackets character that has rendered her one of the most fearsome faces on network television.

She laughs when I tell her as much. “My team is like, ‘It’s kind of nice when people get to meet you and figure out that you’re actually not scary at all,’” she responds. As much as Eaton separates herself from Lottie, she does find herself feeling empathy for the character: “I have to be careful about saying that [Lottie] is similar to me because she runs a cult and eats people. But mentally, [with] the way we look at ourselves and connect to other people…It’s hard to see her as something separate to me. I’m not method or anything—she doesn’t consume me in that way—but it’s very intuitive with her.

If you don’t happen to be one of the millions in the Yellowjackets fanbase, you must know that the show follows a group of high school girls soccer players who must survive in the wilderness following a plane crash. The show’s cast is bifurcated by age: half (including Eaton) play the young adults experiencing the traumatic accident. The other half enact the same roles, now grown adults whose past trauma has corroded their life—Eaton’s teenaged Lottie, the questionably clairvoyant group leader, is countered by the older Lottie [Simone Kessell], who runs a wellness center-cum-cult.

Yellowjackets became a COVID-era hit, amassing a substantial following almost immediately—relatively unsurprising given the specific psychological needs at the moment of its debut: What are we as people capable of in our desperation, and who are we willing to sacrifice? What does community look like at the end of the world as we know it? The ghoulish, intimidatingly relevant piece of television was made even more so by Eaton—who had previously appeared in emotionally vulnerable roles such as Cheedo the Fragile in Mad Max: Fury Road and Riley Hart in Parachute.

A morally grey character like Charlotte, one who teeters between madness and victimhood, proves scrumptious to audiences in the prescriptive arena that is the digital media cycle. Is she a shamanic leader? A wounded girl? Victim? Villain? Good? Bad? Eaton tells me a great deal of her time as Lottie has been spent trying to protect the idea that her character can remain nuanced—an exhausting feat given the enormous pressure on Eaton to ascribe traits to the character outside of her time inhabiting her onscreen.

“[Lottie] is someone who walks a line. I have answers in my head about what motivates her, but in interviews especially, people always want me to be clear about her and why she is the way she is. And I don’t know…She is the character on the show that keeps this belief of something else being out there alive. I don’t know if people actually want to know, even as they ask me to make her simple for them.”

The people looking for answers are, of course, members of the fanbase that has grown famous for its feverish following of the Ontario-set horror. Spaces like Reddit have become a home for the fandom, threads filled to the brim with theories and character dissections. As the fandom grew, it became harder for even the cast and crew of the show to ignore the takes being spread online. There is a shrinking separation between fans, art, and the artists whose work is being discussed. Both groups having such unmitigated access to one another in that way raises complicated feelings for Eaton, understandably. 

“We all went hard reading through the Reddit posts in the first season, but after that, I feel like we all stopped because it got intimidating. Are they going to be disappointed that I played her like this instead of like that? Or, that is a good theory, but the direction we’ve gone in is the total opposite…The fans have come up with such incredible stuff, but I feel like I’d get swayed so I’ve been avoiding it. I feel like that’s also why I push back against explicitly naming what [Lottie] is because I know that when I give that answer, all those other beautifully nuanced readings of her will disappear.”

It was her role as Cheedo the Fragile in Mad Max: Fury Road that introduced her to the world of acting, a part that she landed in her first ever audition. Before that, she was a model, turning up to casting appointments in an oversized Bugs Bunny top and a backwards cap. “I remember my dad telling me off, and being like, ‘You’re going to a bunch of really important meetings—what are you wearing!’

It was a small sign that she was perhaps meant to interact with clothes and entertainment in a different way: “The fashion world is very interesting. Because I started modeling when I was young, I had a very specific idea of what that world was like. When you’re acting, there’s so much you can bring to the table creatively, but with modeling you are a tool for someone else’s vision. I asked myself so many times if I fit into it at all physically, mentally.”

Last year, Eaton got to combine her chops in acting and fashion: she appeared opposite Timothée Chalamet in the viral Martin Scorsese-directed Bleu de Chanel short film. While talking about the role, she blushes a little: “I lost my mind. It was such a quick shoot. I think that week I’d been in five different cities for a bunch of work and when I arrived in New York the night before, it finally dawned on me that I was about to be on set with Martin fucking Scorsese. I feel so lucky that I got to dip my toe in and work with him in that capacity where it wasn’t for a full role; it stopped me spiraling about messing up in front of him and being like, ‘You just ruined your career because you’re a failure who messed up on set, and Scorsese saw you do it.’

The more Eaton speaks, about her work, about her interests beyond acting—the more apparent it becomes that she was never destined to be (in her own terms) “a failure.” Eaton is a fashionista; a committed actress; a woman fascinated by the human mind’s penchant for darkness and a lover of people—she certainly doesn’t eat people like Lottie, but Courtney Eaton does have something in common with the character she’s turned into a modern icon: she refuses to be made simple.

Photographed by Jared Kocka

Styled by Anna Katsanis

Written by Ayan Artan

Hair: Araxi Lindsey

Makeup: Dana Delaney