The Hollywood Reporter
Before Christina Ricci starred on Showtime’s Yellowjackets as Misty Quigley — an eager-to-please high school equipment manager turned crafty and cunning nurse — she made her first foray into television as a guest star on David E. Kelley’s legal dramedy Ally McBeal.
Twenty years ago, Ricci appeared in seven episodes of the Fox show’s fifth and final season as Liza Bump, a cutthroat lawyer who faces off in court against the attorneys of the Cage & Fish firm and ends up marrying Greg Germann’s Richard Fish in the series finale. The actress already had a healthy film career at that point, with her iconic role as Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family as well as performances in Casper, The Opposite of Sex and Sleepy Hollow. She had made an appearance on Malcolm in the Middle and voiced a character in one episode of The Simpsons, but Ally McBeal marked her first notable TV work.
“Back in the late ’90s, my agents were always like, ‘We have to be so careful you don’t become a character actress,’ ” Ricci recently told THR. “They were so afraid of me not being a leading lady.” And of frequently playing “quirky” characters during the early days of her career, she added, “I’m fine with being in the category I’m in because what it means to me is that I have made an effort in my career to do things that I feel like I haven’t seen before.”
Ricci went on to guest star on Grey’s Anatomy, for which she earned her first Emmy nomination in 2006. This year she’s nominated for supporting actress in a drama series for playing modern-day Misty, survivor of a 1996 plane crash that left her and her peers stranded in the wilderness for over a year (Samantha Hanratty plays the teen Misty).
Of watching the younger Misty in the Yellowjackets pilot, Ricci told THR, “I was dying to play the person that was in that scene. I just wanted to go home with her and find out what she did. I was really, really excited about that.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.