‘Yellowjackets’ star Steven Krueger on Coach Ben’s big season, Emmy buzz, wild fan theories, and his directorial debut
Steven Krueger has been a part of the Yellowjackets cast ever since the show debuted on Showtime in 2021. Throughout nearly three seasons, the thriller has charted the harrowing story of a group of high school girls soccer players whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness. In parallel timelines, audiences have watched the girls descend into tribalism and cannibalism in the 1990s, while in the present day, their grown-up versions try to ensure what they did in the past remains a dirty secret. 35-year-old Krueger plays Coach Ben Scott, whose right leg is amputated after the crash, and gradually finds himself cut off from the girls when he refuses to eat human flesh.
If that all sounds like pretty distressing stuff, well, it is. However, the show is also funny, inventive, and sometimes sweet. Krueger’s Coach Ben has grown over the series, both in terms of the character’s prominence in the story and the actor’s soulful performance. Arguably, his biggest moment on the show thus far, though, was the fourth episode of season three, entitled ’12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis’.
This was the agonising episode in which Ben is put on trial by the girls who accuse him of burning down the cabin in season two. As Krueger admitted, shooting the episode was intense because of the sheer amount of dialogue involved, but it was also fun and fulfilling for the entire cast. However, after reading the script—written by co-executive producer Julia Bicknell and Terry Wesley—nobody was entirely sure how it would all come together.
“I remember all of us thinking that it could turn out to be a really bad episode,” Krueger admitted. “When you are in the same set-piece for pretty much the entire episode, with the trial setup, and when that goes on for 25–30 pages, that’s a little dangerous. You always run the risk of the audience getting bored because it’s dialogue versus a lot of action. Those are the hardest episodes, I think, to pull off.”
To Krueger’s delight, though, the script was incredible, and director Jennifer Morrison—a veteran in front of and behind the camera—helmed it perfectly. “Luckily, we had great writing in that episode,” he gushed. “We also had an incredible director who directed our show for the first time. She herself is an actor, and she’s done 400+ episodes of television, so she knew exactly what to do. She knew exactly how to approach it. She did a lot of things with the camera movement and the blocking of all the different characters that kind of subliminally holds the audience.”
“I just appreciated how well thought out it was,” Krueger concluded. “In the end, it ended up being a really powerful, powerful episode. I think it was a little cathartic for everybody because we kind of got to go through the whole backstory for every character along the way.”
For Krueger, playing Coach Ben has become a true gift because the character has evolved in leaps over the course of two and a half seasons—and there is even more to come in the back half of season three. “That’s part of why I love playing this role,” he explained. “There’s so many layers to him, and there’s so many different dynamics that are constantly at play and you see it over the course of multiple seasons, right?”
Unlike some other actors on the show, who like to be surprised by their character’s arc over the course of a season, Krueger is someone who needs to know where his train is heading. He praised co-creators Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, and their fellow showrunner Jonathan Lisco for offering to sit down with any cast members who want to know their overall storyline, which he admitted isn’t always an option on other shows.
“Of course, that always comes with a caveat that things can possibly change as we get into the season based on how things go in the writers’ room,” Krueger admitted. “But for the most part, they’ve done a really good job of saying, ‘At the beginning of every season, here’s where Ben is going to be in the middle of the season and at the end of the season. Here are some of the steps along the way.” This helps him immeasurably in planning, “How can I craft the performance over the course of 10 episodes to match that?” He noted that his castmates who prefer to craft their performances one episode at a time have a “perfectly valid approach,” but he’s found it works better if he has “the bird’s eye view as the performer from the very beginning.”
One unique aspect of season three for Krueger is how much the story dictated that he be separate from the rest of the cast when Coach Ben ventures out into the woods alone. “I didn’t even see them in person until we were well into episode three when I finally was on set at the same time,” he revealed. “And so for, like, a good solid month or so, I really hadn’t even seen most of them in person. It was very funny. The first time I saw them, I was like, ‘I kind of forgot you guys existed.'”
However, while Krueger enjoyed the novelty of it feeling like the “Coach Ben Show” for a little while, he was happy to return to the ensemble’s warm embrace. “It’s a much different experience when you’re kind of carrying scenes by yourself,” he noted. “You’ve really got to be dialled in and just know that the scene is either going to work or it’s not going to work because of you specifically.” He found it to be more daunting than acting in group scenes, but it was “pressure in a great way” because “it forces you to step up.” More than ever before, in his Yellowjackets journey, he realised, “I can’t rely on anybody else to make this scene interesting. What can I personally do to elevate the scene and this material?”
No discussion of Yellowjackets can be complete without mentioning its status as a show that boasts a rabid fanbase who love nothing more than theorising about its many mysteries. For instance, Coach Ben only appears in the show’s past timeline, yet it’s never been confirmed that he is dead in the present timeline. This has led to countless theories about what that means, each one wilder than the last—and Krueger has become more interested in these theories as the show goes along.
After admitting that he steered well clear of disappearing down a Reddit rabbit hole during season one, Krueger now says he likes to “occasionally peruse and see what people are putting online, just because this, to me, is the payoff season of the show. This is where we start to finally get answers to a lot of the questions. It’s a slow burn this season, but by the end of the season, I can promise you pretty much all the questions and seeds that we have planted since the beginning get an answer.”
In a tantalising tease of what’s to come in the remainder of season three, Krueger confirmed that he has read a few fan theories involving Coach Ben’s story that are “pretty close to what’s going to happen. So, I’m very impressed, and I think those people will be happy once they see it play out.” However, with a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I will say I have not seen a single one where anybody is even close to what happens over the back half of the season. I can vividly remember us getting the scripts for some of those episodes, and all of us just going, ‘Oh my God.’ We didn’t even know where it was going. I guarantee you will not see it coming.”
Excitingly for Krueger, his increased presence in season three may also lead to something he hasn’t experienced before: awards consideration. The middle portion of the season includes several episodes that are integral to his character, and his performances have already started garnering Emmy buzz from the industry. When asked about this, though, he chuckled, “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an actor, if you got them in a private conversation, who would ever say, ‘I don’t want to win an award.’ It’s incredibly flattering and humbling.”
However, he insisted, “I don’t necessarily think it’s the thing that I personally strive for. To me, it’s not necessarily about the hardware. This is some solid feedback and some solid affirmation that the work that I’m doing is actually resonating with people. That’s the ultimate goal, I think, as a creative artist.”
For Krueger, an actor who got his start on the CW’s Vampire Diaries spinoff The Originals, it has been an eye-opening experience to see how a role in a show like Yellowjackets has opened doors for him in Hollywood that previously may have remained closed. He admitted that it is often a struggle for actors synonymous with that teen-skewing network to jump into, as he put it, the “elevated world where Yellowjackets lives”. He smiled, “This has been a wonderful opportunity to solidify myself in that world and make that jump, so hopefully, this leads to other things that are at this level.”
While he’s waiting for that next project to come along, though, Krueger is determined not to rest on his laurels. He is already in post-production on his directorial debut, a short film titled Leaving the Light. The star has had an interest in moving behind the camera for years and was excited to get the opportunity to make his own movie. However, he chuckled, “It’s one of the more difficult things I’ve ever done in my career. I will admit it was a big swing to take. I didn’t just make an easy short film, so to speak. I kind of swung for the fences a little bit.”
Instead of doing what a lot of inexperienced first-time directors do—write a talking heads script featuring a small cast—Krueger decided to make a movie about a young mother who “goes on a road trip with her three-year-old daughter in hopes of finding a safe zone during the middle of an apocalyptic event.” He explained, “We’ve got everything from stunts to visual effects to special effects to a whole bunch of driving stuff, which is a challenge in and of itself. The whole thing was shot exterior. So we were dealing with daylight and rushing against time.”
Overall, Krueger found directing to be a fraught, exhausting experience but also a wonderful, creatively fulfilling one, too. “I think it opened my eyes a lot to just how many different parts of making a film there are,” he mused. “As actors, we’re often not exposed to a lot of those parts as much as we should be. I joked with a lot of my crew—people who’ve been doing this for a long time—that I essentially just paid to go to film school for four or five months.”
Fascinatingly, he thinks this expanded knowledge will make him a better performer, too. “There’s so much that I learned being on this side of the camera that I think can be applicable to my work as an actor.” He added, “I enjoyed every single second of it, so I’m hoping that I’ll get to do it again.”
