[This story contains major spoilers from season two, episode six of Yellowjackets, “Thanksgiving (Canada).”] In the latest episode of Yellowjackets, fate finally came knocking at Coach’s door. Ben Scott, the coach of the Yellowjackets soccer team that has been stranded in the wilderness on the Showtime series, has had a target on his back ever since he may or may not have burned the team’s cabin down in the season two finale. Viewers have never known definitively whether or not Ben, who is played by Steven Kreuger, lit the match, forcing the teenage girls into the snowy winter without shelter. But after he was captured in season three, he was put on trial in the 1996 wilderness and found guilty by majority. The ruling ushered in the gradual demise for the only adult in the wilderness, who withered away as a prisoner until the group’s leader, Antler Queen Natalie (played by Sophie Thatcher), stabbed a knife in his chest as a mercy killing in this week’s “Thanksgiving (Canada)” episode. The act gets her dethroned by the rest of the group who believed that Coach, because of a new vision from Akilah (Nia Sondaya), could have had a role in saving them. She saw him as their “bridge home.” Here’s the kicker: The group cooks Coach for their next cannibalistic feast. They hold a celebratory ritual with Coach’s decapitated head on display as they dance, scream and sing. But then strangers interrupt them. Two men and one woman (played by Nelson Franklin, Joel McHale and Ashley Sutton) arrive out of nowhere, seemingly in peace — until one of them notices Coach’s head. “What the fuck?!” Franklin’s character asks, as the episode cuts to black. “Somebody asked me, ‘Why don’t you take the head home with you?’ And I’m like, ‘Why would I wanna do that?’ It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” says Kreuger when speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about Coach’s death and how it leads to major events in the back half of the season. Coach’s death changes everything, he says: “Every time they’ve eaten somebody before, it could be explained away if they were to get rescued. Here, they straight up killed somebody and are now making a ceremony out of eating that person. We see the floodgates open. You start to see why they got to the place they got to, and we finally get that connection to what we saw [in the pilot].” Below, Kreuger shares how he withered away for Coach’s final days, how long he knew about his fate and how the cast threw him the most epic “funeral party.” He also answers burning questions around whether or not Coach really burned down the cabin, and if he thinks the wilderness is mystical. “This is an inflection point in the overall series,” he teases. “This sets off a chain reaction of events that wouldn’t have happened if Coach Ben hadn’t died in this way. As fun as it is to see some of the theories and Reddit threads, I don’t think I’ve seen a single one where anybody has guessed that this is the outcome.” The last thing we see of Coach Ben is his head, on display as the team feasts on his cooked body. How did they make the head? It was quite the process. I marvel at the things they are able to do these days. These special effects makeup people are such talented artists. It was almost like an MRI. I sat on a stool. I was worried that they were gonna have to do a cast. I would have freaked out because I get a little bit claustrophobic. But they take this camera and go around your head to take like 2,000 photographs. Your eyes are closed, but it’s still so bright that I thought if it had lasted much longer than two or three minutes I was going to have a seizure. It was an intense process. Then they brought me back in for something else a couple weeks later and I got to see it. They asked, “Do you want to see your head?” I was like, “Yeah, of course.” Then once I saw it, I was like, “I don’t know if I actually like this.” (Laughs) It looks so real. I really feel like I’m looking at my face, so that was a little disconcerting. Did you touch it? I sure did. I touched it, I held it. I took a picture. I’m pretty sure it cost like $25,000 or $30,000 to make. Let’s rewind. Coach could have died at a few points throughout the show. Oh yeah, the whole way. Did you know the long term plan that his death was coming in season three? I had a behind-the-scenes idea. I’ve known the showrunners for a long time. I’ve worked with Ashley [Lyle] and Bart [Nickerson] for a number of years. We had our first show together back in The CW days on The Originals. When I first came on, they didn’t tell me explicitly, but they did say that Coach Ben, probably some time in season three is when he’ll meet his demise. So I had an idea. They kind of knew what they were gonna do, how they were gonna do it and had a plan from the beginning. Obviously, plans change in the TV world based on circumstances and situations that arise. So this was something I thought they stuck to pretty beautifully. At first, I was like, is this just something they’re doing because more people have to die? But as you’ll see in the next episode, this kind of had to happen. This is an inflection point in the overall series arc, to the point where this essentially sets off a chain reaction of events that wouldn’t have happened if Coach Ben hadn’t died in this way. These people show up at the end of the episode, and if they don’t stumble upon this group of teenagers who are literally feasting on a man’s body, I don’t think that Lottie has that reaction. I don’t think there’s the reaction [you’ll see in the next episode]. All of these things happen because of this death. The arrival of these people is a huge development, because we’ve been wondering when and how the Yellowjackets are going to be rescued. When you first heard or read that they are somewhere where other people could be, what did you think? That’s the reason this is such a shocking storyline. As fun as it is to see some of the theories and Reddit threads, I don’t think I’ve seen a single one where anybody has guessed that this is the outcome of what happens in the wilderness. They are very remote. This isn’t just people hiking, right? These are people there for a specific reason in this very remote part of the wilderness, so it’s just happenstance that they are there at this particular time and stumble upon this crazy scene. In this show, we’ve planted so many seeds. We’ve posed so many questions. Everybody has an opinion about what’s going to happen, how it’s going to turn out. So for the writers to come up with something that in my opinion is not just believable but also incredibly shocking and something nobody’s predicting? That’s creativity at work and why I think the writers of this show are so brilliant. As an actor, did it give you peace of mind knowing Coach was going to survive until season three? I think everybody on the show always holds their breath. Things can change, and of course we’ve seen some deaths that were premature from what they probably were originally planned to be. I have now had the chance to be a part of a number of shows where death is common for characters. This is the first time in my career where the creators and showrunners have been kind enough to give me — and I believe they did this for everybody whose character was dying — a personal phone call before the season started to let us know that our character would be ending this season. That’s not something that usually happens. The standard protocol is you don’t find out until an episode or two before, and there’s a bunch of reasons for that. I thought it was really kind and generous that our showrunners were willing to do that. If you ask them now, they would probably say they regret doing that! No actor wants to hear that they’re losing their job. That’s never a fun phone call to get. In my case, the blow was cushioned because I kind of knew this was coming. My first question was, “Okay, yeah, that sucks, but how does it happen?” I wanted to know if it was an integral part of the story. And once I heard about it, I was so excited. I was ready to dig in because I knew this was going be such an arc. Let’s talk about how method your process got, because you look like you got quite thin by the end. How much weight did you lose and what were you were like on set? First and foremost, credit to our unbelievable hair and makeup team. I have pictures from that last day on set, and I will go back and look at sometimes and just be like, “Oh my God. I looked awful!” They did such a good job of breaking me down a little bit at a time until we got to that final piece and it was like, “I don’t even recognize this person.” I had a long-term plan starting back when we were filming season one. I knew this would be the general arc. We’re stranded out there for a year and a half. My plan was that I wanted to bulk up before we started shooting. I thought that fit the character to have that kind of 1990s New Jersey, meathead, former athlete vibe, and then slowly become thinner and thinner. By the time we got to season two, I was back down to the weight where I usually operate. Then this season, I did drop a bunch of weight. We don’t need to get into numbers, but I will say it wasn’t for shock value. Everything has to be driven by story, so when I was reading the scripts and getting a heads up months in advance about what the storyline was going to be, I was like, “This makes sense. What have I been eating out there?” I didn’t go full Christian Bale in The Machinist. (Laughs.) I did it in a healthy way. The other thing was that it had such a psychological impact. It’s not just the physical, aesthetic stuff for the audience. It’s actually what it does to your psyche and mental state. I think there was a time when Coach Ben probably felt like he could have overpowered these girls if they had attacked him. That was not the case this season. I felt physically weak compared to them, and I think that did a lot to help me in the mental and psychological state that he’s supposed to be in. How long were you filming this episode? We usually do 14 shooting days. So with the weekends, you’re shooting an episode in two-and-a-half weeks. I got the heads up months in advance about the storyline, so I was also able to start growing out the beard. By the time I showed up, I was already in a pretty good place and that just continued from the late spring when we started filming all the way through late summer when the storyline ended. So you filmed chronologically? Yes. That’s part of what I love about this show. This is a heavy show. The material is heavy psychologically, it can really weigh on you. We film in order and each episode we film in blocks of the wilderness storyline and then the present-day storyline [with the cast who play the adult survivors]. We’ll work and then they’ll move on to the adult storyline, so we get a break to catch our breath, reset, throw away the stuff that we did in that episode and start working on what’s next. What was your last scene that you filmed? Believe it or not, the last scene that I filmed was me lying dead and naked on the table as they are discussing carving me up! So that was actually you, not a body double or dummy? Yes. When I read the script, I assumed that I was going to be my own head and that they would use a dummy for the full body. It was the exact opposite! They were like, “No, we actually want you to lay on the table.” I’m like, “Really? Okay, cool, so I’m just gonna be naked on a table.” They’re gonna paint me white and gaunt, and then you’re make the head for a whole bunch of money. (Laughs) I know that you’re close to some of your cast, Sophie Nélisse almost cried to me when teasing your death. Was it hard to play out your final scene? It was. I had my eyes closed the whole time. I do get a little claustrophobic like I said, so I’m always kind of twitchy if I know people are around me with my eyes closed. So it was actually a little bit of a challenge! But the makeup team, the hair team, we had just sold it so well, and so I think actually seeing me there lying in that state, it got to people. Along the way every time somebody saw me, they were just like, “oh my God.” You just instantly feel bad just because of the way I looked at that point. I heard you had an epic funeral party thrown for you in Coach’s honor. Sophie told me they went all-out at Party City with death-themed décor. Yeah. It was very fun. They did it up. They did it right. It was right around when we were filming that last episode. Usually we do it around the episode that the person dies. They hosted it, they got little funeral programs printed that had my picture. I had a little eulogy. It was a celebration of life. We just hung out and shared stories and had a grand old time. It went quite later than anybody anticipated. Did you have any sort of reaction when you saw that they were going to eat Coach’s remains for their next cannibalism feast? I knew that was going to happen. That was always part of it. I think the bigger reaction, once I zoomed out a little bit and started to realize what this event meant in the grander context of the story — this is the first time that an actual murder has been committed. To me, this is crossing a line, and even though the context around it softens it a little bit — essentially, this was kind of a mercy killing, almost like an assisted suicide — it’s still murder, and that’s the first time they’ve really crossed this line. Every time they’ve eaten somebody before, it could be explained away if they were to get rescued. Like, “That person died and we were starving and we had to eat them. Okay, that’s understandable.” Here, they straight up killed somebody and are now making a ceremony out of eating that person. Then we see the floodgates open over the course of the last few episodes. Now, it’s open season. You start to see why they got to the place they got to, and we finally get that connection to what we saw at the very beginning in the pilot of them being savage hunters and killers of each other. This is the start of that. We’ve always been wondering how Nat (played by departed star Juliette Lewis) ends up how she did as an adult. Javi’s (Luciano Leroux) death was a point of no return for her. Now that we know she’s the one who actually kills Coach, have you imagined the impact that would have on her for the rest of her life? At the beginning of the season, I was like, who is going to actually do it? I hadn’t asked that question when we started filming, but I could almost guarantee it’s Nat. It has to be. It makes sense. The two of them have an instant connection back from season one. They see each other as kindred spirits. They’re both outsiders. They have developed one of the closest relationships in this wilderness timeline, even if it’s not super close this season. I think it’s poetic. To me, that was like, “This makes so much sense why she is the way she is when she’s older.” I mean, nobody can deal with that. Not to mention, she’s immediately called out for being a murderer. And demoted from her Antler Queen throne by the group because she mercy killed him. Yes, and taken down, exactly. All of her worst nightmares come to fruition in one fell swoop. Now that you will able to look on from afar, where do you land on the power of the wilderness? Jonathan Lisco gave me a very detailed, fascinating neuroscientific answer. I bet it was neuroscientific and philosophical. He could teach a college course on this. How do you explain the mystery element in Yellowjackets: Is it the wilderness? Is it neuroscientific? Is it trauma? I live much more in my left brain than I do in my right, which is something I’ve tried to suppress as an actor. I immediately was looking for the scientific explanation to all of this. I’m like, “The woods are not haunted. It’s not Lost, there’s not a smoke monster. There’s gotta be some sort of explanation.” What I love is we do get that explanation this season. We understand why a lot of this stuff is happening. However, I think it ties back to how hard it is to put yourself in that scenario of being truly alone and stranded for a full year and a half in the middle of nowhere. The effect that must have on your brain and overall mindset and how you take in information, everything’s got to be so warped and heightened. I think that’s the basic explanation of what happens to these young girls. We’ve completely lost our minds because, how could you not? Maintaining any semblance of sanity would just be impossible. One of the biggest burning questions is if Coach burned down that cabin. So, Steven, was he innocent or was he guilty? I have two answers. I have my own internal answer and then I have an answer as a viewer. If I was an audience member, I would be like, why are we so quick to blame a human being for doing this? We were literally in a God knows how old dry, wooden cabin. We’ve got an open fireplace with a raging fire every night and 50 candles, and everybody just goes to sleep. Seems like a tinder box to me! I think it probably was just an accident. But that speaks to the state of mind of all these people, right? Everyone is so on edge and ratcheted up that they need somebody or something to blame that makes sense to them. This was something I started pondering from the beginning of the season. I worked with a phenomenal acting teacher and coach named Gregory Berger who he helped me process a lot this season, because it was too simple to just say, did I burn it down or not? That wasn’t as interesting to me as the why and the how. What we came up with was that I do think I burned down the cabin. I’m actually pretty positive I burned down the cabin. I did not, however, do it to kill them. That was not my intention at all. The reason behind it — and if you ask the writers about this, they’ll be like, “we don’t know what the hell he’s talking about, he must be on mushrooms or something!” because this is not them, this is all me — but I believe I did it because I saw them descending into this group of chaotic, mad people and I wanted to wake them up from the stupor that they were in. I wanted to reunite them as a team, get them to work together again. So I figured if I can get them out, wake them up, this is going to be something that’s actually good for them in the long run. And what I tried to do this season was, it wasn’t about whether they were going to kill me or not, it was more about making this the hardest thing they would ever have to do. Because that ultimately is what’s going to get them to take off their masks. Ben’s problem his entire life was that he was hiding behind a mask. He never really got to live as the person he was. I didn’t want that for them. So if I was going to pass on one thing to these young girls, it was: be who you are. Don’t be afraid of that. If you’re a monster, be a monster. If you’re a savior, be a savior. But the only way to actually get them to do that was to make me dying be the most challenging, difficult, heart-wrenching possible thing that I could ever be. This is an inflection point in their lives. And that’s what I worked on internally, to give myself some higher stakes rather than just, “I want to survive.” Did you share this with your showrunners at all? I feel a little more at peace with his death, now hearing you say that he knows this was inevitable. Some of the girls were like, “how could we possibly do this?” And some of them were like, “this is what we have to do.” And that’s the only way to actually get them to become the people they really are on the inside. I think setting them against each other in that way was the ultimate goal once we got into the meat of the season. Do you think Coach will come back to haunt them? That’s part of the cool thing of this show, no character is ever truly gone forever. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see his face again. Either in flashbacks or maybe Ghost Ben and Misty [Christina Ricci] team up to solve crimes in the present day — Walter [Elijah Wood], Misty and Ghost Coach. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is not the last we’ve seen of good old Coach Ben. Any Coach wisdom to leave us on? This is our payoff season. It’s been a slow burn, but I really am excited to see people’s reactions to getting some of these answers and seeing how some of this stuff comes to fruition. I’m worried about what they turn into without you there. It gets ugly. I’ll tell you that, and fast. Yellowjackets season three releases new episodes Fridays on Paramount+, with a linear airing Sundays at 8 p.m. on Showtime. Follow along with THR‘s season coverage.