Yellowjackets production designer Margot Ready details all of the different residences she worked on in Season 3.
Ahead of the new season, Yellowjackets production designer Margot Ready was excited about all the “world-building” she was going to do, starting with the teepees and huts in Season 3, Episode 1’s, “It Girl.”
“It’s always really fun to do a village set because it involves so many characters,” says Ready, “and you know you’re going to be in it a lot, too, so you do need to add a lot of realism and detail. But if you’re creating a new world or a world they’ve created, you almost have to get into their mindset.”
Among the structures she and her team put together were Travis’s tree house and an A-frame for Tai and Van with an airplane seat up front with crumpled airplane metal over the doorway. Then, they moved into circular structures that were more straightforward to build.
“When we did some research on simple human civilization development of structures, the circular structures just come across in so many different cultures. You build a base, and you put some strong branches on it and you do effectively form this very simple structure and cover it with whatever materials you have on hand — in this case twigs, branches, and leaves. We did decide we would do a more complex build eventually. Of course in the pilot of the show, they have these amazing costumes and these torches and you feel like they’re moving towards a visual culture, so we wanted to represent that as well.”
Caves That Can’t Feel Man — or Woman — Made
Even though it takes place in the wilderness, Yellowjackets Season 3 tasked Ready to create a lot of indoor sets this season, including caves.
“I will admit that cave sets are my personal pet peeve in film and TV as a designer; they are so difficult to do realistically. Because you need a flat surface for the film crew, we tried to create shapes that minimize the flat area and create islands of rock so it doesn’t give away we’re using foam as fake rock. We used a lot of real materials in the village, and I feel very happy with the realism we achieved there, whereas the cave was entirely fake, entirely made of foam and paint and a little bit of real moss and greens on top of it. We were really careful to defeat the natural human tendency to do things in a way that creates a pattern or that simplifies.”
During the first walk-through with the showrunners, Ready says the caves felt too much like a corridor, too controlled and carved by humans.
“So we developed the system where we created these random templates that would twist and turn and then we put randomness into the system itself. We had set designers create random templates and then we gave them to sculptors and construction to put them in a random order so it forced us into creating some wild shapes, and then the rock mold also had random shapes in it.”
Hotels that Go from Swank to Skank
While the ’97 characters are still roughing it, the modern-day Yellowjackets get to stay in an assortment of places indoors this season.
“There were many hotels and penthouses and domestic things you’d think were locations but ultimately we built. We built two hotel sets that were the exact opposite of each other in terms of the feel, and we built them for the same episode.”
Tai (Tawny Cypress) and Van (Lauren Ambrose) stay in a swanky hotel, while Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) and her family stay at the more rustic Jolly Hitcher. Ready says creating the luxurious hotel for Tai and Van was one of her most favorite sets ever.
“It was cozy and lovely. When you do a hotel set, it’s quite visual. It’s very Pinterest, really. You can lean into your architecture side and just be like, we’re making this clean, simple thing.”
Meanwhile, The Jolly Hitcher did not go off without a hitch.
“In many ways, it was probably one of the most challenging sets of the season because Ashley [Lyle] and Bart [Nickerson] had attachments to some ideas for New Jersey hotels that were slightly nice and upscale but also had certain ’90s cheesiness to them or memories in the ’90s. We wanted to feel like Jeff wants to get in there and redecorate this hotel with the jewels, and it’s painful for him.”
The Jolly Hitcher needed to feel a few steps below Tai and Van’s swanky stay and a few steps above Natalie’s motel from Season 1.
“We searched forever for this yellow wallpaper. We really pushed our comfort zone searching for the perfect carpet that has enough pattern but doesn’t feel like a casino. Eventually, we put some wood on the wall because we realized it was a lot of yellow and reds.”
Final Resting Places for Two Characters
Finally, Ready took one of Vancouver’s most iconic sets, Riverview Hospital, and recreated it for Lottie’s (Simone Kessell) death scene, where she’s pushed down a flight of stairs by none other than Callie (Sarah Desjardins).
“I want to give full kudos to our sculpting and our amazing paint department. That is a wild location to try to match on stage; it is known to have been painted 120 times, it’s layered like crazy. There’s dripping water, pipes everywhere. It’s probably a painter’s dream as long as they’re like keen to go for it, but I was so proud of the work that they did because you really couldn’t tell the difference and that is a very tough one to do.”
While she wasn’t the production designer for Season 1, Ready also had to recreate Pit Girl’s death sequence, including the pit itself.
“We basically had a 50-foot/60-foot diameter open area in the forest that was gravel. There was nothing there, and then we brought in some contour to make it look real for the ground. We graveled it up and dug an actual pit. This is a big part of the season, so you want the realism of being able to fly over it or go down and up. We had concrete retaining walls, we had a sump pump because it’s Vancouver — it’s gonna flood. Thankfully, we had excellent weather. Then, we landscaped it and brought in the same kind of trees and engineered all these trees into the foundations. It was rather large to do and quite a bit of work to texture, but we wanted it to feel like a different part of the forest.”
Yellowjackets is streaming on Paramount+.
