Yellowjackets
Season 1 M-Net (*101) 21:30 Drama
On the surface, drama series Yellowjackets follows a group of plane crash survivors whose lives are turned upside down when they are blackmailed. At the centre of the storyline though, are the different ways they struggle with their childhood trauma now that they are adults, especially Taissa Turner (Tawny Cypress). In flashbacks from 25 years earlier, she’s an overambitious star athlete who’d do anything to win a game. “But in the present, she’s a politician who’s just as cunning and willing to go to extremes to become a senator,” says Tawny. “She is a good person on paper, with a great family and an even better career. But secrets will catch up to her…”
The 45-year-old’s parents split up before she was born. “My mother worked odd jobs to make ends meet. She decided to raise my older siblings in a middle-class community, so we moved. Like 31 times,” she says. Tawny’s mom moved her family according to the seasons – in winter, they lived on the Jersey Shore in New Jersey “because it was cheaper and in summer we moved inland”.
She got a bursary to the Mason Gross School Of The Arts at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, but she dropped out because her grades were too low. She then moved to Miami to become a singer in jazz clubs.
She divorced her non-celeb husband Bill Charles in 2013 after what she calls “a massive falling out”. He claimed that she organised a hit on him and he suffered brain trauma from the assault, which the actress was later cleared of in court. “The lawsuit is totally without merit. It’s completely false and the fact that he could stoop so low isn’t surprising,” she says.