Samantha Hanratty on Yellowjackets, Motherhood, and Pushing Herself to the Limits.

Being pregnant is far from easy. Now picture being pregnant on a high profile TV set. In the middle of the Canadian wilderness. For six months out of nine. Picture a pregnancy of great physical strain. Now picture having to tolerate bouts of morning sickness, fatigue, and dizzy spells while trying to inhabit the body and mind of a semi-psychopathic teenager. For the average person that scenario would appear in itself a scripted fantasy. For actress Samantha Hanratty, it was a stark reality.

It's certainly not the scenario Hanratty imagined herself in as an exuberant and ambitious eight-year-old with her heart set on the world inside her TV screen. Hanratty knew at age two she wanted to be an actress. It took a few years to convince her mother, but eventually she caved and mailed her daughter's picture to a Los Angeles casting agent from Arizona. Hanratty's million dollar smile turned a common pipedream into an actuality, and after a few commercials gigs, Hanratty claimed a place for herself in the very Disney dramas she had aspired to act in—iconoclastic Gen Z shows like "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody," "That's so Raven," and "Shake it Up."

While some people are skeptical of the ethics of child acting, Hanratty retained her bubbly, happy disposition as a child. Hanratty adored the process of auditioning and booking jobs. But when puberty came, bringing its inevitable challenges, Hanratty was forced to take a step back and reflect on her trajectory. At fourteen, she acted too old to play eight but still looked half her age.

"That was a tricky time in my career, and I had to ask myself: 'Is this what I really want to do for the rest of my life?' I'm glad I faced that question at that age because it made me love acting even more and want to work harder." After the reassessment, Hanratty pivoted out of the Disney and Nickelodeon circuit and began finding roles on indie sets.

At seventeen she booked the lead in a Lifetime film called "Zoe Gone," which confirmed Hanratty's intuition for a diverging path: "I loved playing somebody different, and I think that was the start of realizing I didn't have to be in a specific box—that I could do any of it and all of it." Not long after, she booked a role on "Shameless," and by the time the "Yellowjackets" audition came along, Hanratty had put enough distance between her and Disney to feel confident taking on the complexities of the role.In "Yellowjackets"—Showtime's breakthrough hit—Hanratty plays Misty Quigley, the equipment manager, social outcast, and resident sociopath of a New Jersey soccer team stranded in the wilderness after a plane-crash.

The first season of "Yellowjackets" was filmed at the height of the pandemic, over the course of six months, mimicking the protracted seclusion of the story itself, the actors a pod shielded from the outside world with restricted interactions even with members of the set itself. The intensity of restrictions combined with the lack of audience reception made the first season particularly hard. Enthusiasm faltered, and conviction wavered amongst many, but Hanratty had faith in the show's success after first reading the pilot. She took to bolstering enthusiasm in her fellow cast members—much like Misty with her teammates in the show's script.