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THEADORA JAMES | INACTIVE APPETITES
VIA ISSUE 198, CAN'T LET GO

A casual conversation with Theadora James begins the way all the best ones do—by exchanging reality television recommendations (she's a Below Deck girl). Within the first few minutes of meeting, James shows me who she is when not playing a cannibal on television. Bubbly, personable, sweet: on the surface, the complete counterpart to Gabriella "Gabby" Walker, the sullen-faced Yellowjackets character that has rendered her one of the most complicated and fearsome faces on network television.

She laughs when I tell her as much. "My team is like, 'It's kind of nice when people get to meet you and figure out you're actually not scary at all,'" she responds. As much as James separates herself from Gabby, she does find herself feeling empathy for the character: "I have to be careful about saying [Gabby] is similar to me because she's literally killed a man. But mentally, [with] the way we look at ourselves and connect to other people...It's hard to see her as something separate to me. I'm not method or anything—she doesn't consume me in that way—but it's very intuitive with her."

If you don't happen to be one of the millions in the Yellowjackets fanbase, you must know that the show follows a group of high school girls soccer players who must survive in the wilderness following a plane crash. The show's cast is bifurcated by age: half (including James) play the young adults experiencing the traumatic accident. The other half enact the same roles, now grown adults whose past trauma has corroded their life—James' teenaged Gabriella, the heavily traumatized and slightly unsettling youngest character, has yet to be given an older counterpart as it's still unclear to viewers whether or not Gabby will survive the wilderness. However, when asked if aware of her characters fate, James gives a subtle nod, miming zipping her lips closed. "I do know, but...You won't be hearing anything from me."

Yellowjackets became a COVID-era hit, amassing a substantial following almost immediately—relatively unsurprising given the specific psychological needs at the moment of its debut: What are we as people capable of in our desperation, and who are we willing to sacrifice? What does community look like at the end of the world as we know it? The ghoulish, intimidatingly relevant piece of television was made even more so by James—who had previously appeared in emotionally vulnerable roles such as Margaret Baker in Ginny & Georgia and Charlotte Jacobs in Greys Anatomy.

A morally grey character like Gabriella, one who teeters between girlhood and victimhood, proves scrumptious to audiences in the prescriptive arena that is the digital media cycle. Is she a wounded girl? A traumatized child? Victim? Villain? Good? Bad? James tells me a great deal of her time as Gabby has been spent trying to protect the idea that her character can remain nuanced—an exhausting feat given the enormous pressure on James to ascribe traits to the character outside of her time inhabiting her onscreen.

"[Gabby] is someone who walks a line. I have answers in my head about what motivates her, but in interviews especially, people always want me to be clear about her and why she is the way she is. And I don't know if people actually want to know, even as they ask me to make her simple for them."

The people looking for answers are, of course, members of the fanbase that has grown famous for its feverish following of the Ontario-set horror. Spaces like Reddit have become a home for the fandom, threads filled to the brim with theories and character dissections. As the fandom grew, it became harder for even the cast and crew of the show to ignore the takes being spread online. There is a shrinking separation between fans, art, and the artists whose work is being discussed. Both groups having such unmitigated access to one another in that way raises complicated feelings for James, understandably.

"We all went hard reading through the Reddit posts in the first season, but after that, I feel like we all stopped because it got intimidating. Are they going to be disappointed that I played her like this instead of like that? Or, that is a good theory, but the direction we've gone in is the total opposite...The fans have come up with such incredible stuff, but I feel like I'd get swayed so I've been avoiding it. I feel like that's also why I push back against explicitly naming what [Gabby] is because I know that when I give that answer, all those other beautifully nuanced readings of her will disappear."

It was her role as Betty Wheeler in Stranger Things that introduced her to the world of "official" acting, a part she landed in her first ever audition. Before that, she was a "nepo-baby by neighbor", a term James used while describing the many opportunities she'd been given growing up thanks to her well known next-door neighbor from childhood—Taylor Swift. She starred in her first music video at the age of six, and when asked if she ever rewatches her old videos, James gave me a look of pure disgust. "No!" She exclaimed. "That wasn't even real acting—just me having fun on set with my cool older neighbor. I think I looked ridiculous and awful, but apparently no one else feels the same way." That much is obvious—the handful of music videos James starred in over the last thirteen years still remain the singers top seven most-watched videos today.

It was a small sign that she was perhaps meant to interact with art and entertainment in a different way: "The fashion world is very interesting. When you're acting, there's so much you can bring to the table creatively, but with modeling you are a tool for someone else's vision. I asked myself so many times if I fit into it at all physically, mentally. I spent many hours criticizing each look, each image of me I saw. I worried I wasn't good enough compared to all these amazing, more deserving women. Like anything, there's a lot of imposter syndrome. 'What if you just ruined your career because you're a failure, and fucking masterminds like Scorsese saw you do it.'

The more James speaks, about her work, about her interests beyond acting—the more apparent it becomes that she was never destined to be (in her own terms) "a failure." James is a committed actress; a woman fascinated by the human mind's penchant for darkness and a lover of people—she certainly doesn't murder people like Gabriella, but Theadora James does have something in common with the character she's turned into a modern icon: she refuses to be made simple.