Her best roles often contain that seed of ferocity in Heavenly Creatures: a demure facade masking a roiling interior self, from Sundance indies like I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore to the recent TV hit Yellowjackets, where she plays a suburban mom with a potentially cannibal past. Over the next three decades, she had to find her own way past damaging Hollywood ideas about women and their bodies as well as her own self-doubt and eating disorder. It introduced Winslet to the world and established Jackson as a filmmaker to watch. “I was like, don’t be ridiculous,” she recalls.īut Suzy was right, and Heavenly Creatures went on to premiere at the 1994 Venice Film Festival where it won the Silver Lion. After the audition, Lynskey hung out at the cemetery with her friend Suzy who assured her she got the role. Like her character, she wanted to get out of this town, too. Lynskey, dark-haired, pale, shy, and a little bit goth, looked and felt the part. They had already found a young Kate Winslet to play Juliet Hulme, the glamorous, imperious foreigner, who kindles Pauline’s wild imagination. She and Peter Jackson were going into production for their film, Heavenly Creatures, but hadn’t settled on an actor to play Pauline Parker - one half of the infamous matricidal pair of Christchurch teens in 1954.
Melanie Lynskey was 15 when the producer and screenwriter Fran Walsh came to the lunchroom at New Plymouth Girls’ High School in New Zealand.
