Melanie Lynskey only appears a handful of times in Don’t Look Up, but each of her scenes packs a punch — and not just because she hurls prescription bottles at on-screen husband Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) after she catches him cheating. In a movie where the loudest and most belligerent voices take center stage, she infuses June Mindy with a quiet determination that drowns out the nonsense around her. 

Lynskey’s talent shouldn’t come as a surprise: The New Zealand–born actor has been stealing scenes since 1994, when she made her big screen debut alongside Kate Winslet in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Since then, she’s made a career out of playing relatable women... or, at the very least, the ones who tend to carry dark, twisty secrets under a soft-spoken, unflappable exterior. 

Long known for her quirky and memorable supporting roles — she “[had] a baby! In a bar!” — Lynskey’s has dominating the pop culture conversation right now. Alongside her turn in Don’t Look Up, she co-stars in the sleeper hit Yellowjackets, as the later-day Shauna Shipman, a survivor of a devastating 1990s plane crash that left her and her soccer teammates stranded in the Canadian wilderness. On the surface, the projects couldn’t appear more different: The former satirizes the unsettling fallout from learning that a planet-killing comet is headed straight toward Earth, the latter explores the trauma of (possibly) turning to cannibalism in order to survive, but Lynskey’s roles in both demonstrate her uncanny ability to embody ordinary women faced with extraordinary circumstances. And in these uncertain times, the sense that we’re all just making do with the unimaginable feels more relatable than ever. 

Ahead, Lynskey takes us on a journey through some of her most interesting performances. 

How did you come to be cast as June Mindy in Don’t Look Up?
My agent said to me, “I think you’re going to get offered this movie. I’m trying to get you the script.” And I was like, “I feel like I’ll just do it anyway,” because it’s an Adam McKay movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. That was all I knew at that time. I was so excited. And then I started hearing about the rest of the cast, and I was just like, “Are you kidding?” Every piece of the puzzle was dreamier and dreamier. It was amazing.

Aside from Cate Blanchett, who co-starred with you in Mrs. America, you hadn’t worked with many of these actors before. Did anyone surprise you?
Leo [is] so grounded and so cool. He’s been so famous, respected and admired for so long. I just assumed there would be some kind of arrogance, which isn’t very fair of me. The biggest surprise for me was just how nice he was. We bonded [over] looking at Zillow.

Wait...  Zillow?
I regularly look at my dream houses [on] Zillow, like a lot of people do. He told me about [an] SNL sketch he thought was so funny, and [we] just sat there looking at his phone and being like, “Have you seen this one?” It was just really fun to have something in common. I kept getting caught off guard by how comfortable I was with him. But I was supposed to have been married to him for years and years. 

Looking at houses on Zillow is definitely something married people do.
Yeah, [there were] a lot of very married-people conversations about game nights and Zillow.

Don’t Look Up was filmed during the pandemic, so the end scene where the cast is all cooking dinner together is very striking. It was a real moment of community we’ve all been missing. What was that experience like?
It was honestly one of the most beautiful days of my life. Timothée Chalamet is a great improviser. He’s very weird and funny. Every take, he would say something that was so strange. They hired a local chef to cook all that food, so it became all of us just trying to get our favorite dishes. I don’t know if people were having parties without me — that’s what I’m always assuming — but I wasn’t part of any parties, gatherings or anything like that. And I hadn’t been in my own life; we’d been in lockdown for so long. Getting to have a dinner party with people who I’d come to care about was really special. 

Between Don’t Look Up and Yellowjackets, you’re bridging two very big pop culture moments right now. Does your work have a connecting thread?
Something about it has to feel real and believable to me. I have to have something internally where I’m like, “I know how to play this person.” If I feel like I’m just going to be doing a performance, it’s not for me. There has to be something that makes sense to me, but I don’t ever really know what it is.

So, cannibalism is... relatable?
Yeah! [Laughs] No, but there’s a certain amount of reluctance to process things from my past. Shauna is holding on to a lot of stuff she doesn’t want to deal with, and that’s been an issue in my life. I just try to push through things like, “Well, I’m over that now.” I don’t deal with it by killing rabbits and feeding them to my family, but [there’s a] certain similarity here.

I’m often cast as an ordinary woman who’s dealing with something that’s not ordinary, which I’m very grateful for because it’s a very fascinating thing to explore as an actor. Who are you after your whole life gets shaken up.

Your Netflix movie I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, about a nurse on a quest to find the people who robbed her, is a good example of that.
That’s my favorite job I’ve ever had. We all still, the whole cast and the director, text each other every single day. I got 30 texts from them this morning. It’s such a magical time in my life remembering making that movie, and the whole experience of going to Sundance and [winning]. I loved getting to play that person who really found herself on a mission. 

You seem to often play women who are very comfortable with themselves but are nonetheless overlooked by those around them. I’m thinking of your performance as Jacqueline in Ever After, which resonated with so many young women.
Before I did that movie, I asked a lot of questions. It was my second movie ever, but it was really important to me that the movie wasn’t making fun of her or saying she was fat and unattractive. I just was like, “This is just her mother’s perception. Her mother’s just an asshole, and she actually has this lovely daughter who’s perfectly fine.” I feel like I look more like a lot of women than some actresses, and I don't want people to ever watch me and be like, “This show or this movie is telling me that somebody who looks like this is fat or unappealing.” I want people to look at me and be like, “I think that’s what I look like. And here’s this person who’s being valued and who has self-esteem.”

You were just a teenager when you starred in your breakout role, in Heavenly Creatures. Do you have advice for actors coming up in the industry today? 
At the beginning of production, I reached out to the young cast of Yellowjackets and said, “I’m here for you if you ever need anything. If anyone asks you to do something you feel weird about, if you want to go to the producers about anything, I’ll go with you, I’ll go for you, whatever you need.” It’s very hard when you’re coming up and you start to realize how competitive it is. When you do finally get to a point where you’re cast in something, you feel so lucky and you’re like, “Well, I can’t complain.” But they’re much better about it than people of my generation were. There was a lot of bad behavior, and we were supposed to just be like, “Well, that’s part of it.” These young people are very good at advocating for themselves. 

Did you have that kind of mentorship when you were coming up? 
Anjelica Huston was so kind and generous to me. [She was] like a big sister. Katrin Cartlidge, who was and still is my favorite actor, passed away when she was 47. But a couple years before she passed away, I got to work with her. As an artist, she inspired me more than anybody. She was really helpful in narrowing down what kind of work I wanted to do. My friend Kathy Najimy [has] been a great sounding board, friend and mentor.

What have you been watching to keep sane? 
My husband and I recently binge-watched Doctor Foster. It looks sweet initially, [but] it gets so crazy. You come to believe this woman is capable of anything. Like, “What’s she going to do? She’s going to kill everybody? I don’t know!” It’s absolutely insane. We also love Queer Eye. Tan [France] is like a little angel on earth. And I’m trying to watch all the Academy movies and be a responsible voter. The Power of the Dog was so amazing. Passing was so amazing. The Lost Daughter [is] the one that has really, really stuck with me in a crazy way. I’m walking around my house thinking about it. What a debut. 

So basically we’re manifesting a collaboration between you and Maggie Gyllenhaal. 
Please, please!

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.