Jasmin Savoy Brown, As Herself

Check out the full cover feature with Jasmin Savoy Brown, with photos by Lia Clay, in the pages of WUSSY vol.11 — available now to order. Styling by Marisa Ellison

You’ll have to forgive her, but Jasmin Savoy Brown isn’t totally sure where the hell she is. “Where am I? That’s such a good question!” she exclaimed recently, sunlight spilling in the background of her Zoom window. “I’m in Vancouver,” she confirmed -- perhaps as much for herself -- then added with a self-deprecating laugh, “I’m all over the place.”

Savoy Brown is all over the place, and we’re loving every minute of it: from a Ghostface-infested New York subway car for Scream 6, where she plays witheringly funny final girl Mindy Meeks-Martin, to the deep and snowy forests of remote Canada, where she may or may not eat some of her soccer teammates as teenage Taissa Turner in Showtime’s runaway hit Yellowjackets. Plus, she’s been making her way directly from our ears to our hearts as Jasmin Savoy, solo artist, dropping sultry croons like “Orange Wine” and “goddamnit,” whose music video features actress Sophia Ali of The Wilds in a glorious queer-universes-collide for which we are definitely here.

It's been a stellar ride for Savoy Brown, who got her start as brooding teen Evie Murphy on HBO’s The Leftovers and sailed onto an episode of Grey’s Anatomy before landing another Shondaland coup as a plucky defense attorney on ABC’s For the People. And 2022, with an enthusiastically received debut in the Scream franchise and a lead in a new smash-hit show, was a year to write home about. But beyond the marquee roles and the jetting all over the place, Jasmin Savoy Brown has done something truly spectacular: she’s done it on her own terms.

“I didn’t get to grow up seeing myself onscreen,” she told WUSSY. “There were a few amazing Black women actors – who I will die to meet and work with someday – but now, the writing is catching up, the directing is catching up. There are just more opportunities.”

Not only has Savoy Brown portrayed a wide array of complicated, multilayered Black women on screen, a remarkable number of them have been queer. What’s more, she’s playing Black queer women in story lines that don’t treat that reality as a novelty to be gawked at or fawned over.

The idea that queerness can be a feature, not the totality, of a character is perhaps most remarkable in Savoy Brown’s role in Scream, which has long held pride of place in the horror genre. The Scream films have always been queer-coded – the camp! The mise en abyme! Gale Weathers’ impeccable blazers! – but Savoy Brown plays the franchise’s first queer character. And while Mindy is openly gay, her gayness is not the point: she’s way busier avoiding being stabbed to death and rooting out which of her friends are a serial slasher than agonizing over how to tell her mom she’s a lesbian.

“Mindy’s personality isn’t based off of her sexuality,” Savoy Brown told The Advocate’s Tracey E. Gilchrist last year. “Her sexuality is just a part of who she is, and her personality is something completely different. That, to me, is a really big deal.”

It is a big deal. Savoy Brown, 28, is part of a generation of ‘90s babies – your correspondent included – whose fledgling, pre-teen queer yearning coincided with some of the first representation of queerness on screen. The early aughts delivered Queer as Folk, South of Nowhere, and films like Brokeback Mountain and Imagine Me & You – stories that centered gay characters, but layered them in closeted misery or confusion, obsessed with the conflict of coming out in a straight world. Those characters were also overwhelmingly white and cis, and largely played by straight actors, who often received adulation for convincingly pretending to be gay.

Even so, that era was a huge step forward, and for many of us those stories became touchstones we reached towards to build the selves that felt like home. But the last half-decade has seen a true advancement in onscreen representation, where artists are bringing their own racial, gender, and sexual identities to all sides of a creative project. From A League of Their Own to Insecure to Special, writers and directors are finally getting a chance to tell deeply specific stories informed by their own experiences – and actors are playing characters that reflect the people they really are. That means–lucky for us--Savoy Brown strolled onto the scene at just the right moment, with the talent and the timing to breathe real life into queer characters of color.

“Mindy is so lived-in and real because they allowed me to make her that way...”

Meanwhile, filmmakers are wising up to the fact that simply portraying diversity isn’t enough, and that authenticity matters as much as representation. The creators of Scream 5 and 6 are mostly straight and white, so while Mindy was written as gay character, Savoy Brown said the team followed her cue to develop her into a full, authentic person.

“Matt (Bettinelli-Olpin), Tyler (Gillett), Chad (Villella) and William (Sherak) are amazing directors and producers,” Savoy Brown told me. “And they defaulted to me, as the person who is a queer woman of color, when I would say, ‘This line should go this way,’ or ‘Let’s throw in a kiss here,’ they would say, ‘Yes, whatever you say goes!’”

That collaborative approach, she thinks, is key to showing more kinds of identities onscreen, in ways that are informed by the lived experience of real people. “Mindy is so lived-in and real because they allowed me to make her that way,” she said. “That’s how it should be all the time.” What’s more, we now know that Mindy survives another 120 minutes of slashercore, meaning Scream has–thus far–escaped the Bury Your Gays trope.

If you haven’t yet seen 6, take comfort: Savoy Brown assured us that adding a touch of authentic lesbian romance has not diluted the film’s fear factor. In fact, she said, things have only gotten scarier. Scream 6 is not for the faint of heart, she told us before it release, adding with an ominous chuckle, “You might want to go to the movie with someone when you see it.”

I, a proud card-carrying member of the lily-livered club, will not be seeing Scream in theaters, thank you very much: the franchise has been haunting my dreams since I was ten, when Scream 3 came out and all the teen magazines ran Scream-inspired scary stories to read aloud at sleepovers. While all the other girls slumbered soundly in their Pocahontas sleeping bags, I lay awake, eyes as big as peppermint patties, realizing I could never again let a dog lick my hand, lest it in fact be a serial killer who had skinned the real dog, hung it from the shower curtain, and written in blood, PEOPLE LICK TOO.

If I watch Scream 6, it will be during the day, with the lights on, and only to see if Jasmin Savoy Brown kisses anyone pretty betwixt the slashing and the stabbing.

That said, I have pushed myself to my fear-factor limit in order to consume Yellowjackets, whose use of suspense, gore, and insinuation of cannibalism is all in service to an absolutely superlative plot (spoilers ahead – for your own good, go watch Season 1 now so you can catch Season 2, out on March 24). The show, set in the mid-nineties and present day, features two glitteringly talented casts that play, as teens and adults, a high school soccer team whose plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness en route to a national championship. Stranded for nearly two years, the survivors (we still don’t know how many) endure blizzards, starvation, wolves, and the sinister threat of possibly-supernatural forces, not to mention each other – bitchy, spiteful, and secretive, with all the petty alliances and complicated intimacy of adolescent girlhood.

Savoy Brown plays the teenage Taissa Turner, who has the charisma of a U.S. president and enough disturbing psychological secrets to choke a Gestalt therapist. As a teen, Taissa is the natural leader of the group, but frequently clashes with her teammates over her strident, blaze-ahead actions.

It’s a challenging role, not least because it’s a plot-heavy show whose plot is still being written. “We don’t know any more than you do!” Savoy Brown assured me. “We are constantly on set digging around, like, ‘Who knows what?’ or ‘I heard so-and-so is going to have this scene.’ They don’t tell us anything until we get the script.”

“I don’t want to make a bunch of white people rich.”

While it can be maddening to be in the dark on what happens next, Savoy Brown likes the spontaneity the unknown provides. “In a way it allows some freedom, allows me to be more present,” she said. “If my character doesn’t know what’s going to happen next week, then she’s going to make a decision based on this moment.”

Other actors might prefer to hold all the cards ahead of time, but the immediacy of Yellowjackets is ideal for Savoy Brown, whose style feels effortlessly candid. She’s part of a new generation of screen actors, who – perhaps because of the rising ubiquity of cameras in our personal lives – can mimic realism so completely that her on and off-screen personas feel seamlessly fused. Her loose, easy smile and contemplative gestures are as genuine on Zoom as they are during a dance party set in a creepy dead guy’s hunting cabin.

Yellowjackets also makes authentic use of its queer talent to portray Taissa’s relationship; as a teen, she’s furtively hooking up with her teammate Van, played by the sharp and lovable Liv Hewson. As an adult, Taissa (here played by Tawny Cypress) is married to Simone (Rukiya Bernard), raising their son Sammy (Aiden Stoxx), in what appears to be a happy family unit until things go horrifyingly awry.

Hat, CHRISTIAN COWAN; Skirt, ASHISH; Gloves, WING AND WEFT

Savoy Brown and Hewson are both queer – they created the podcast The Gay Agenda (later titled The Homo Schedule) for Netflix – and their onscreen relationship feels as natural and fun as a real teen romance, unencumbered by fraught identity crises or elaborate schemes of deception. They’re just kids in the woods, figuring out what it means to love for the first time – all while getting their faces ripped off by wolves and possibly skewering and eating their midfielders.

For all the intricate relationships and devilish plot details, the big question ahead of Season 2 is, of course, do they eat each other? The show implied as much in its first episode but has so far masterfully – and maddeningly – evaded further detail. I asked Savoy Brown to elaborate on an interview she and Hewson recently gave to the outlet Them about Season 2, in which they said, “The girls will eat.” Well????

She wouldn’t budge. “It’s Yellowjackets,” she replied, smiling wickedly. “It could mean anything.” She did let me know that Season 2 has more in store for everyone involved – much more. “You don’t even know what Yellowjackets is yet,” she promised. “The first season is nothing.”

With both Scream 6 and Season Two of Yellowjackets out in March, it had already been a thrilling month for Jasmin Savoy Brown fans. But then–what’s this?--Lucy Dacus dropping the long-(very long)-awaited music video for “Night Shift,” starring the very same Savoy Brown?? Our eyes did not deceive. Our lesbian cups runneth over. Life is good.

For queer audiences, it’s been electrifying to see Jasmin Savoy Brown get to play deep, complicated queer characters of color on screen, portraying people who are as real and multilayered as herself. I wanted to know, what has that experience been like for her?

Her answer surprised me. While there is the incredible reward of being able to step into roles like these, and the pleasure of performing new, authentic storylines, Savoy Brown told me that it’s in examining and realigning her own life that she has really been able to see the value in being truly herself.

“I’m mixed-race – my mom is white and my dad is Black – and I grew up in an all-white space in Oregon,” she said. “My relationship to my racial identity has been complicated because of that, and it’s taken intention and effort to change that.” During the fallow period of the pandemic, Savoy Brown began appraising her communities and relationships, embarking on a period of profound transition. “I looked at my professional team – my agents, managers, lawyers, business manager – and thought, oh my god, my team is really white!” She explained. “White people are in a lot of positions of power in the industry, but I plan to be a very successful, rich, money-making performer, and I don’t want to make a bunch of white people rich.”

She let go most of her professional representation – “I kept the best and the brightest of the white people,” she joked – and assembled a new team comprised of queer people and women of color.

She also made shifts in her friends and family relationships: she asked her white family members to educate themselves about Black identity, and they embraced the opportunity, taking a class with Savoy Brown’s therapist about anti-racism and what it means to be Black in America. And she surrounded herself with friends who she felt truly grounded and affirmed her whole self.

Full Look, CHRISTIAN COWAN; Earrings, PATRICIA VON MUSULIN; Gloves, WING AND WEFT

“Everything in my life changed,” she said. “In every area, in every space in my life, I feel seen and respected.”

It was a powerful lesson for Savoy Brown, but it also sends a powerful statement in an industry where artists, especially artists with marginalized identities, are expected to be grateful for any chance to work at all. To see a talented woman of color know her own value, surround herself with others who know and share that value, and then unapologetically set the terms of how that value is expressed – that is to see the sun rise on a new version of tomorrow.

For today, and we hope for many tomorrows, Jasmin Savoy Brown is all over the place. But wherever she is, on-screen or off, as a musician, actor or podcast host, whether stabbing or singing or skewering, she’s doing it as her real, honest self. And that is the role we really love to see.

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MUA: Kento Utsubo
Hair: Sergio Estrada
Fashion Stylist: Marisa Ellison
Stylist Assistant: Morgan Haberfield
GFX: Blake England
Writer & Editor in Chief: Rachel Garbus

Cover Story: Jasmin Savoy Brown, As Herself

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