Heavenly Creatures, as teen murderer Pauline Parker, the actor has built her career on playing complicated women. No matter how big or small the role—from a conflicted not-so-evil stepsister in Ever After to the soft-voiced leader of a revolutionary movement in —the actor finds seemingly contradictory traits in her characters and melds them together with nuance and care.
The women Lynskey portrays are angry, nurturing, fearful, strong—more often, they're all of the above.Those qualities are certainly all present in Shauna, the plane crash surviver turned bored housewife turned murder who Lynskey played to critical acclaim on .
In season two of the hit Showtime series, which returns March 24, they'll be even more amplified as Shauna deals with the fallout of stabbing her lover after she (wrongly!) thought he was blackmailing her. “Last season, Shauna was dipping her toes in the water of doing something illicit,” says Lynskey. “When she killed somebody, it really opened a whole can of worms that she had not been expecting to deal with.
She'd been repressing, repressing, repressing for such a long time. This season is about her coming to terms with her past. We see her trying to grapple with how much she enjoys that feeling of danger—and how much she needs it.
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