Melanie Lynskey

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Melanie Lynskey has been described in The New York Times as "polite almost to the point of pathology." The writer, Alexis Soloski, added that offscreen the actress is unnervingly nice. Onscreen, she noted, Lynskey specializes in taking that same niceness apart. Lynskey was born on the 16th of May 1977 in New Plymouth, New Zealand. For more than three decades she has played women who look meek, breathy and bland, until limitless anger and desire break through. She says she has no training. She relies on instinct alone. Directors including Macon Blair and Clea DuVall have written parts with her in mind. Yet for years the studios hesitated to put her name at the top of a poster. How did a shy schoolgirl from a provincial New Zealand town become the actress filmmakers keep reaching for? Why did Hollywood directors take her for an American? And what did it cost her to be seen on her own terms?

  91314

• 2. The Girl From New Plymouth

  ›

  Five hundred girls had already been considered for the role of Pauline Parker, and the filmmakers felt that none were right. Then a casting director visited New Plymouth Girls' High School. A shy student named Melanie Lynskey spent her spare hours in the drama department there. School plays suited her, she later explained, because someone handed her the words and for a moment she did not have to be herself. It felt, she said, as though a weight had lifted off her shoulders.

  Lynskey is the eldest of five children, with three brothers and one sister. Her father was still a medical student when she was born, so the family kept moving. When she was six they spent a year in England before returning home. She remembers always being the new kid in school.

  Heavenly Creatures, a psychological drama based on a murder case from the 1950s, gave her the part of a schoolgirl who conspires to kill her mother. Fran Walsh, who co-wrote the screenplay, praised Lynskey's "quiet intensity." Walsh said the filmmakers knew at once she was right. Lynskey turned 16 during production and was 17 when the film opened in 1994. Her co-star was Kate Winslet, who later said, "Mel is like the left side of my body." Roger Ebert congratulated director Peter Jackson on choosing "the right two actresses." Time's Richard Corliss called the pair fearless in capturing teenage hysteria, and he singled out Lynskey as a first-time actress.

  The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Lynskey was named Best Actress at the 1995 New Zealand Film Awards. Even so, the people around the film urged her not to make acting her career. By her account, they thanked her for the movie and asked her to go to university and find a normal job. Nobody wanted to be blamed if she ran off to Hollywood. New Zealanders, she observed, are very practical.

  She took part of that advice. She studied English literature at Victoria University of Wellington for a year and a half, then dropped out to pursue film. In between she played a policewoman in Jackson's The Frighteners in 1996 and starred in a Fringe Festival staging of Jean Genet's The Maids. A director named Mark Tapio Kines then offered her the lead in Foreign Correspondents, after reading online that she wanted to work in America. It was shot in Los Angeles in 1997 and drew notice for an early use of crowdfunding. Next came Ever After, a feminist retelling of Cinderella filmed in the south of France. Lynskey played Jacqueline De Ghent, the stepsister of Drew Barrymore's heroine. She credits Barrymore and co-star Anjelica Huston with building her self-confidence. In 1999 she would appear in four features.

  1922233039

• 3. Accents and Instinct

  ›

  Tim Blake Nelson estimates that he auditioned about 50 actresses for a pregnant cannabis farmer's girlfriend in Leaves of Grass. Lynskey, he said, gave him by far the most credible Oklahoma girl. When she finished reading, she began chatting in her natural New Zealand accent, and he could not believe it. Her south-eastern Oklahoma accent had been so exact, and so specific.

  Lynskey says she learned American speech from Joss Whedon. When she first moved to Los Angeles she stayed in his guest bedroom and watched movie after movie, absorbing the accents.

  She once used the skill as a trick. Director Jason Reitman had always refused to cast non-American actors in American roles. For her audition for Up in the Air, Lynskey avoided chatting with him so he would never hear her real voice. She says she tricked him into giving her the part. Reitman later admitted he was thrilled.

  Behind the voices is a method she describes as purely instinctive. She has no formal training, so when a director's note feels like a lie to her, she argues the point and can get feisty. She says she feels the truth of a scene in her body. Her improvisation skills come from classes she took when young. She often uses dreamwork to find a character, and for every film she keeps one song that takes her to the right emotional place.

  Steven Soderbergh, who directed her in 2009, offered the best summary. He said you never quite know what you will get from her, only that it will be good.

  9173765

• 4. Sitcom Money, Indie Heart

  ›

  Rose, an endearingly devious stalker on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, began as a single appearance in the pilot episode in 2003. The producers liked her enough to bring her back as a series regular. She stayed through the first two seasons. Worried about being typecast, Lynskey left the main cast in 2005 to concentrate on film. Showrunner Chuck Lorre said he had "a lot of respect for" the decision, though he was not happy at first. She kept returning as a guest star until the final episode in February 2015. "Doing three or four episodes a year enabled me to pay my mortgage and do independent films," she later said. Viewers of the sitcom assumed she had no other work, while independent filmmakers had never heard of it. In her words, "I couldn't have done one without the other."

  The films kept coming. In Shattered Glass in 2003 she played Amy Brand, a writer at The New Republic, in a drama about the fall of the journalist Stephen Glass. In 2006 she played Pauline Harnois, the fame-hungry fiancee of a soldier, in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers.

  The year 2009 brought three small roles that critics remembered. In Away We Go, directed by Sam Mendes, she played Munch, an adoptive mother shaped by repeated pregnancy loss. Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe singled out a grief-stricken pole dance she performs for her husband, writing that her whole life is there in her long face and drooping limbs. In The Informant! she played Ginger Whitacre, the devoted wife of Matt Damon's whistleblower character. Soderbergh asked her not to contact the real Ginger, because he wanted her to decide for herself how much the woman knew. Lynskey concluded that Ginger had no idea what was going on. She counts the film among her favourite experiences.

  In 2011 she played a drug addict in Win Win, and Time's Mary Pols declared her one of the most reliably intriguing supporting actresses working in film. That reputation was about to meet its limit. Studios still wanted a bigger name.

  5756676987

• 5. Carrying the Film

  ›

  In Hello I Must Be Going, released in 2012, Lynskey appeared in every scene for the first time in her career. She played Amy Minsky, an unemployed divorcee who moves back in with her parents. She called the experience "a lot of pressure." She had assumed the part would go to someone like Michelle Williams or Maggie Gyllenhaal, because she lacked what the industry calls bankability. Director Todd Louiso said he knew casting her could make the film resonate on a thousand different levels. The performance earned a Gotham Independent Film Award nomination for Breakthrough Actor. The obstacle remained. She said that directors and creative teams would want her, then the studio would say no, which she called depressing, though she understood the financial worry.

  Independent film became her home anyway. Happy Christmas in 2014 was almost entirely improvised, and Lynskey played a novelist whose creative spark returns when her disruptive sister-in-law arrives. That same year she gave voice to Beatrice, an ill-tempered bluebird, in the animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall, which has since become a cult classic.

  From 2015 to 2016 she played Michelle Pierson on HBO's Togetherness, created by the Duplass brothers. She called the heavily improvised series a dream job and described Jay Duplass as her "creative soulmate." Critic Robert Lloyd said she became the show's gravitational center and that you could feel her feeling. The role earned a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination. In March 2016 HBO announced there would be no third season, and Lynskey likened the news to having her heart broken by someone she still loved.

  The Intervention, also in 2016, was Clea DuVall's directorial debut. DuVall wrote the uptight, alcoholic Annie for her friend. Lynskey saw a therapist beforehand so she could stand up for her view of the character without harming the friendship. She won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Individual Performance at Sundance. In 2017 Macon Blair wrote Ruth, a nursing assistant who takes justice into her own hands after a burglary, with Lynskey in mind. I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, and she received a Gotham nomination for Best Actress.

  Lynskey has said she wants stories about women who are interesting and complicated, and that independent film is where that happens. She has made films that cost $50,000 in total. Critics began calling her an "indie queen." In 2018 the Seattle International Film Festival held a tribute event to celebrate her career.

  3132999758

• 6. Rage Beneath the Surface

  ›

  Showtime premiered Yellowjackets in November 2021, with Lynskey as Shauna Sadecki, a suburban housewife hiding grim secrets about a plane crash twenty-five years earlier. Rolling Stone called her the standout of the ensemble. The Guardian said she does by far the most emotional heavy lifting. Lynskey said she was drawn by Shauna's "internalized rage" and by a dark streak she loved and also feared. She won Best Actress in a Drama Series at the 27th Critics' Choice Awards, and her acceptance speech paid tribute to her daughter's nanny. Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress followed in 2022 and 2023.

  Hulu aired Candy in May 2022. Lynskey played Betty Gore, a Texas schoolteacher with postpartum depression who is murdered by Candy Montgomery, played by Jessica Biel. Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com said she conveyed so much with a sigh or defeated body language. Lynskey said she and Biel took great care over the choreography of Betty's death. Critics' Choice and Satellite Award nominations followed.

  Craig Mazin created Kathleen Coghlan for HBO's The Last of Us, premiering in January 2023, because he wanted to work with her. Kathleen is a ruthless war criminal. A line such as "kids die, they die all the time" struck one IndieWire critic as an all-time cold-blooded villain quote, delivered with exhausted gravity. It brought Lynskey an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series.

  Not every role of this period was dark. In 2021 she played a stoner in Justin Long's directorial debut, Lady of the Manor, enjoying the freedom of sweatpants. She also played Leonardo DiCaprio's put-upon wife in Don't Look Up.

  In Mrs. America in 2020, she played Rosemary Thomson, a champion of the anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist Phyllis Schlafly, who was played by Cate Blanchett. She did not share Rosemary's beliefs, but her Baptist upbringing helped her empathize. In Peacock's The Tattooist of Auschwitz, released in May 2024, she played the social worker Heather Morris opposite Harvey Keitel. She called the filming "heavy" but important. In 2025 she starred in Pike River, a drama about the 2010 mine disaster, as Anna Osborne, the spouse of a miner who died. She formed a close bond with the real Osborne and hoped the families would win their fight for corporate accountability.

  93281412

• 7. Under Scrutiny

  ›

  In a 2012 interview, Lynskey said the only parts she was offered for a while were "fat-girl parts." She pointed out that she is a size 6 and joked that this felt like a radical statement. In 2022 she told The Hollywood Reporter that early in her career she was already starving herself and as thin as she could be. Wardrobe teams still piled shapewear on her. One costume designer told her, "Nobody told me there would be girls like you." She says the feedback was constantly that she was not beautiful.

  She has been open about an eating disorder. She was "very unwell" for a long time, her hair was falling out, and she was deeply unhappy. Recovery meant truly becoming comfortable with herself, she says, because you cannot fake it.

  The attention returned with Yellowjackets. She told The Guardian that much of the response fixated on her weight. She tries to tune it out and listen to the women who thank her for appearing on screen without pinching her tummy. The creators of the series, she said, were excited that she is "an average-size woman," and nobody pressured her to look different.

  In February 2023, fashion model Adrianne Curry implied Lynskey's body type made her wrong for a villainous leader in The Last of Us. Lynskey replied that the character is supposed to be smart and that muscle is what henchmen are for. Co-star Jeffrey Pierce defended her, arguing that Hollywood has built a poor mythology of what power looks like. He praised the grace and courage she showed.

  By then the industry's view of her had turned. Writing for InStyle in 2022, Laura Norkin called her "the nicest person in Hollywood." Actress Danielle Brooks said people react to her name by saying she is the real deal who will deliver. TheWrap's Libby Hill called her a "pop culture fan favorite." She has appeared on magazine covers including The Hollywood Reporter, InStyle, Variety, TheWrap and Backstage. Though not gay herself, she is widely regarded as a gay icon.

  3191312

• 8. Beyond the Screen

  ›

  On the 14th of April 2007, Lynskey married American actor Jimmi Simpson in a chapel on Lake Hayes, near Queenstown, New Zealand. They had met in 2001 on the set of Rose Red, the Stephen King miniseries that marked her television debut. There she played the protective older sister of a girl with supernatural powers. They became engaged in 2005. She filed for divorce on the 25th of September 2012, and it was finalised on the 23rd of May 2014. The two remain good friends.

  In February 2017 Lynskey announced her engagement to actor Jason Ritter, whom she had been dating for four years. They had a daughter in December 2018 and married in 2020. Earlier, in 2015, she had starred with Ritter in a music video for the Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers song "Waiting on Love."

  Lynskey has lived in Los Angeles since 2000. Her close friend Clea DuVall is someone she met on the set of But I'm a Cheerleader in 1999. That cult satire, in which she played a young woman undergoing conversion therapy, is considered one of the foremost examples of LGBTQ cinema. She became a vegetarian at age 10 after learning about sheep farming, and she now identifies as pescetarian. She has misophonia and describes herself as a feminist.

  Her sideline projects are varied. In 2012 she voiced an animated version of herself in an Air New Zealand safety video. In February 2013 she joined Jason Reitman's Live Read of Glengarry Glen Ross, with a cast of women reading the all-male script, and took the role of George Aaronow. From 2014 to 2016 she appeared in The Thrilling Adventure Hour, a staged podcast in the style of old-time radio. She served on the jury of the U.S. Narrative Competition at the 2017 Tribeca Festival, and in June 2018 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In October 2023 she narrated Devin Scillian's Memoirs of a Hamster for Storyline Online, which promotes child literacy. For 2024 she was named a judge of the Heath Ledger Scholarship, which gives financial support and mentorship to emerging Australian talent.

  5342414498