Jasmin Savoy Brown compares growing up religious and queer to her Yellowjackets character
Jasmin Savoy Brown stars in Yellowjackets (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Paramount+)
Jasmin Savoy Brown stars in Yellowjackets (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Paramount+)
Jasmin Savoy Brown has reflected on growing up religious and queer, noting that her experience was like that of her Yellowjackets character Taissa Turner.
Savoy Brown stars as young Taissa in the psychological thriller series and is also known for her turn as Mindy Meeks-Martin in Scream. The actor – who uses she/they pronouns – is also flexing their executive producing muscles on the self-created podcast Today in Gay, a news series created “by and for the queer community”.
In an interview with Nylon Magazine in light of the Yellowjackets season three launch, Savoy Brown reflected on their Evangelical Christian upbringing, “praying in tongues, exorcising people of demons, all that stuff”.
“I have two versions of my history in my memory that are both real but totally conflict,” she explained, likening her experience to that of her queer character on the Showtime psychological drama.
“One, I was always praying for my future husband, but I also had this queer memory of being in love with my female friends and being obsessed with drawing boobs in my journal. It’s like sleeping Taissa and waking Taissa,” Jasmin Savoy Brown described. “Both are in me but completely separate, and it’s kind of confusing to acknowledge that.”
They continued: “I came out at 21 in the most Aries way possible. I think I FaceTimed my mom one day and was like, ‘I have a girlfriend.’ I was really intense about it, and it was difficult for my extended family on my mom’s side. But 10 years later, my cousin just married a woman. I feel like I led the way.”
While Taissa isn’t portrayed as being religious on the series, she appears to experience a wholly different life in whom she calls “Other Tai”, who first appeared during the team’s time in the wilderness. Savoy Brown’s co-star Tawny Cypress, who plays a grown-up Taissa, wanted to “make it very clear” to Nerdist that “Other Tai” is not “a split personality or dissociative state”.
Season three of Yellowjackets is available to stream on Paramount+ in the US, UK and Australia now.
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