Are the Teens Being Rescued? Star Talks [Spoiler’s] Death (Exclusive)

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 6, “Thanksgiving (Canada).”]

All of Yellowjackets‘ burning questions are finally being answered. What really happened in the woods? How did they get rescued? Did Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) make it out alive? Season 3 Episode 6 triggers the domino effect that leads to the truth. It’s the most important episode of the entire series so far, and it’s all because of another major character’s death.

Following his guilty sentence in the Episode 4 trial, Ben was saved from execution in Episode 5 after Akilah (Nia Sondaya) had a vision that he would be their “bridge” to salvation. That proved to be true in Episode 6, but it came at a cost for the coach who had already paid dearly in the wilderness.

The teens incapacitated the already physically disabled Ben by cutting his achilles tendon on his left leg so he couldn’t try to get away from his makeshift prison. He then went on a hunger strike not to force them to let him go, but in the hopes that he would die. The trauma finally broke him beyond repair, and it was made worse when the teens force-fed him to keep him alive after his hunger strike stretched on for weeks. He begged Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) to kill him, and she refused at first. Eventually, she performed a mercy killing and stabbed him in the chest under cover of night. Ben cried tears of relief when he realized was Natalie was doing.

Yellowjackets fans have long predicted that Ben would die in the woods, but some held out hope that he would make it out (plenty of Ben survival theories have been shared on social media since Season 1). What they couldn’t have predicted was the teens being found by outsiders during their feast on Ben’s body. The episode’s final moments revealed Joel McHale, Ashley Sutton, and Nelson Franklin‘s characters (although their identities are still a secret), who screamed at the sight of Ben’s decapitated head before the episode cut to black.

Here, Krueger breaks down the pivotal episode and teases what’s next.

Did you know Ben’s fate from the beginning, or has his story gone through changes since Season 1?

Steven Krueger: I had a previous relationship with the showrunners, so I’d worked with them for a lot of years before this show. So just in offhanded talking behind the scenes about the character, I had been given the general idea that Coach Ben would probably meet his ultimate demise sometime in Season 3. I was a little prepared for it from the beginning. I will say to our showrunners’ credit, they broke protocol a little bit this season when it came to alerting actors to their characters’ deaths [Simone Kessell’s adult Lottie was killed off in Episode 4].

Typically the protocol is, you don’t find out until an episode or two before when you’re filming that your character is dying. There’s a whole myriad of reasons for that that have been established over a lot of years, and I understand why. Like I said, to our showrunner’s credit, they called everybody who was dying this season, myself included of course, and gave them months of heads up before we ever started filming, which I thought was really generous and really kind. As soon as I heard the news, my immediate question was just tell me more, how.

I just wanted it to be a cool death. I wanted it to be impactful. I wanted it to mean something. This is an inflection point in the entire arc of the series, so as much as I’m an actor who wants to stay on a really amazing show and keep working on it, I’m also really happy that the way this is going down leads to a whole lot of other things.

Colin Bentley / Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

My jaw dropped at the reveal of those three new characters. It’s so exciting, but also so tragic because Ben was so close to being found.

I know! If Ben had been alive, even if he was in really rough shape, had he just been alive, tied up in the animal pen, but still breathing, none of the rest of that stuff goes down.

Part of the cool thing about this show, and the thing I always chuckle at is a lot of feedback that I’ve heard this season is, “Oh, man, it’s getting brutal,” and “it’s tough to even sympathize with some of these characters at this point.” What did you think was going to happen from the beginning of the series? The very opening scenes were teenage girls hunting each other down, murdering each other, and then stringing them up and draining their blood so that they could eat them. We’ve got to get from point A to point Z at some point. This is the natural progression of that. Coach Ben, unfortunately, having to be a part of that is part of what makes it cool.

I don’t think anything that the writers do on this show is just, “Ooh, we want to be cutting edge and shock the audience.” It’s all in line with the ultimate story that’s being told. It is a brutal, and at times very uncomfortable and difficult-to-watch story that we’re telling. That’s just the nature of what we’re doing on the show.

Did knowing that far in advance that Ben was going to die this season make you crank up your performance?

Overall, my approach to every episode and every season in general is the same. For me, it works better when I have all the information ahead of time. I’ll always talk to the creators, to the showrunners and say, “Hey, what are the touchpoints of the character that I need to know so that I can figure out how to craft the performance over the course of the entire season?” I spent a lot of time doing that with the showrunners leading into this season just because I knew it was going to be a bit of a meatier arc leading up to the death — pun very intended.

I will say the difference between my approach and preparation this season versus previous seasons, because the episodes were so heavy, I found myself not being able to move on to the next episode until we were completely done filming one episode. Our scripts usually come out every two weeks-ish or so once we’re into the heart of the season. And it’s always a fun event because we don’t know exactly what’s going on in the story. The scripts hit our inboxes, and it’s dead quiet in the cast tent if we’re on set. Everyone all of a sudden is on their phones or their iPads reading the script because everybody wants to know what happens. I found myself waiting to read it even for days or a week after the script came out, because I was like, if I start reading what’s going to happen next, I am automatically going to be thinking about those scenes. And I need to focus on what’s right in front of me because it was a lot to deal with.

You knew when Ben would die, but were you surprised by how it happened?

There were some surprising things about it. I always had in my mind that this was how it had to go down if he was actually going to be killed. I knew that it had to be Natalie. I didn’t know exactly what the circumstances would be surrounding it. I also think that the big shock for me was just how brutal it gets throughout this last episode. From the force-feeding stuff to the time jump that we do within the episode over the course of many weeks or even months where we’re going from summer all the way into fall, and just [Ben’s] deterioration that we see not just physically, but psychologically as well. How much they really went there, that part did surprise me a little bit. As soon as I read it, I was like, whew, OK, this is not going to be a fun episode to film.

But I think that it truly was a perfect ending to the character. This is something that needs to happen in order for the story to progress. I also think that this is the first time they’ve really crossed the line. This is the inflection point. Up until now, everything [the teens have done in the woods] can be explained away. This is our first move into what really would be categorized as murder. And by the end of the episode, the real jaw-dropping moment is, oh my God. And then as we see over the course of the next few episodes, this had a domino effect. This led directly to all the stuff that we’ve been wondering about.

Tell me what it was like to film that force-feeding scene.

It was a challenging scene to film in the sense that you had the action that’s taking place is very intense and potentially dangerous, and you also have five people that are crammed into a very tight area, which can always get a little bit tricky as far as camera. So we spent a lot of time rehearsing it. We spent a lot of time figuring out exactly where everybody’s hands needed to be, just so that everybody felt safe on the day when we were actually filming it. But yeah, I mean, it’s not fun to see or hear.

Colin Bentley / Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

Oddly enough, he died rather humanely all things considered. Do you think Ben was thinking that when he realized what Natalie was doing? Was he happy about it?

Absolutely. That’s what he was essentially begging for. He knew it wasn’t going to go well. He knew that if he continued to stay alive, he was just going to be treated more poorly. The guy’s in pain, he’s suffering. It’s like, please just help me out. And nobody else seemed willing to do it except for Natalie. There’s probably a lot of ambivalence in her mind of I did the right thing and yet also I did just kill somebody, and why wasn’t she strong enough to stop it from getting to that point in the first place? Part of what I love about this season, and this is a microcosm of it, is that you really do start to see those touch points in the characters’ lives in the ’90s storyline that ultimately are affecting what they’re doing and how they’re behaving in the present day. You really start to see a lot of those connective tissues being formed versus before you just made the assumption that some crazy stuff happened out there.

Did Ben really burn down the cabin? Is that something you can talk about?

I’m not sure that we ever truly get a clear cut answer on that. I think part of the intrigue is that’s always left open to the audience’s interpretation, which personally I love because it kind of doesn’t matter if he burned it down or not. What matters is the fact that these girls responded in such a way that ultimately led to a lot of really tragic sh*t.

I will say…I spent a lot of time with an acting teacher that I work with named Gregory Berger, who I just adore. He and I started coming up with a lot of ideas about is it strong enough to just say, did I or did I not burn down the cabin? And to me, it never really mattered. It was never really a strong enough motivator for me. And so we came up with some slightly deeper stuff that drove me in a certain direction. So I can say that in my mind, I actually think I did burn down the cabin. I do not, however, think that I did it to kill them. Take that for what you will, but that was the story I was working with the whole time.

If I was a viewer, the most obvious explanation to me is, this is a decades-old wooden cabin in the middle of nowhere with open flames literally all over the place, everybody’s falling asleep, and there’s a giant fireplace. Accidents happen. But the fact that they’re so quick to jump to needing to blame somebody, I think speaks to the psychological state that these girls are in.

I keep on thinking about Paul, Ben’s boyfriend back at home. Was Ben thinking about him in these final moments?

Yeah. We saw in Episode 5 him starting to slip into some of those daydreams, hallucinations where he is hearing Paul’s voice, and I think that’s one of the things in the back of his mind is whether it’s real or not. For him, [death] may ultimately be the way back to Paul. If he has to die and he has to succumb to this particular end, then maybe that ends up actually being a good thing. On the reality front, maybe it gives Paul some peace of mind. Maybe they come up with a story of how it happens, which I’m sure they do, and I’m sure we will see all of that once the rescue actually does take place. I would love to see [Paul] appear on the show a little bit more when the girls are finally back and dealing with, “OK, what happened? Somebody give me an explanation. Where did Coach Ben go?”

Teen Natalie is not yet the deeply traumatized adult Natalie [Juliette Lewis] we knew. Is killing Ben what really broke Natalie, or are there more dark times ahead that will — forgive the pun — twist the knife further?

Oh, there’s a lot more ahead. This was the first domino to fall. And had this never happened, then you could probably justifiably say that all of the things that come after it never would’ve happened either. So I think regardless of what Natalie personally does going forward, there’s a lot that weighs on her in the sense that she started this chain reaction. That’s why the burden on her was so heavy.

Can you tease what happens next after this game-changing ending with Joel McHale, Ashley Sutton, and Nelson Franklin’s characters?

We see these people appear, and then pretty much immediately afterwards starting in the next episode, we see the knee-jerk reaction of the girls to these new people showing up unexpectedly. That’s what sets off the domino effect for really the rest of the series. People have been yearning, if not begging for some answers to some of these questions that we’ve been planting since the beginning of the show. How did they get out? How are they ultimately found? How are they rescued? Here’s your answer. I love that. I also love the fact that we are getting some answers to what’s going on in the woods. Is this a psychological thing? Is this actually a supernatural thing? Is there some sort of explanation? We actually start to get those answers. I remember reading these couple of scripts and Episode 6, 7, and 8 and just being like, oh, it’s so good.

Our creators, our writers, they are not just throwing sh*t against the wall and seeing what sticks. They have had a plan. This is the story they always planned to tell, and I’m really excited that people are finally getting to see that payoff.

Yellowjackets, Fridays, Paramount+ With Showtime, Sundays, 8/7c, Showtime